On these two fronts were played out a limited confrontation, which in the Caucasus ended in war. For Russians, Ukraine is not really abroad. The language, history and culture is so close and shared, and families so mixed up, that a trip there ‘does not count as being abroad’. This translates into a belief by swathes of the establishment that Ukraine is not a ‘true’ state and cannot be permitted to be ‘severed from Russia’. This goes as far as the hope of eventual reunion. As one former Russian official, who published under a pseudonym, wrote in his memoir:
Russian bureaucrats know the Soviet Union is dead. They do not know that it cannot be recreated. Indeed a re-union around a core of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus seems rather likely.76
Stopping Ukrainian NATO membership is essential to Russian hopes for maintaining a sphere of influence or reintegrating with the two Slavic ex-Soviet states. And without a sphere of influence, Russian intellectuals lament, ‘we are just a big state’. In practice this sees Russian diplomats give various arguments from ‘having Ukraine in NATO is as intolerable as Britain seeing Ireland join the Warsaw Pact’, or, as the pro-Kremlin analyst Dmitry Suslov bluntly explained, ‘This is impossible for us as Ukraine to Russia is not Austria to Germany, but Bavaria to Germany.’ Feelings were particularly intense as huge numbers within the Russian establishment had been born in Ukraine or studied there, or have Ukrainian parents. The other side of the coin was that a successful pro-Western democracy in Ukraine would undermine Putinism by example. This is why at the NATO Bucharest Summit in 2008 Putin threatened the US and said ‘Ukraine is not really a state’, as he sought to dissuade NATO from giving it – together with Georgia – a Membership Action Plan, an agreement that starts a country’s nuts and bolts integration into the alliance.
In a different way, Georgia was a challenge. Mikhail Saakashvili, the ‘rose revolutionary’ president, pioneered a ‘Georgian model’ for post-Soviet states. Ideologically it was a fusion of reformist economic liberalism and pro-Western nationalism. It was also a threat to the Putin model because it was hugely successful in eliminating petty corruption and gangsterism. Contrary to Russia, on indicators that measure corruption, property rights and ease of doing business Tbilisi’s score rose rapidly. After the overthrows in Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan, the Georgian model was held up as a way forward. Opposition groups across post-Soviet states admired it as a successful model to exit trapped post-Soviet transitions – not Russia.
The short Cold War turned hot in Georgia in August 2008. On the night of the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympic Games a decision was taken in Tbilisi to attack and occupy South Ossetia. Saakashvili believed that reuniting – if necessary by force – with this rebel region of Georgia that had broken away in the early 1990s was his destiny and a national imperative. However, South Ossetians’ ethnic kin were mostly living next door in Russian North Ossetia. Most had with the encouragement of Moscow, acquired Russian citizenship during the 2000s. Russian officials say that the ‘Georgian Hitler’ attacked Russian peacekeepers and sought ‘genocide’.77 Most Russians, including opposition activists such as the then little-known Alexey Navalny, shared this view.
The then Georgian National Security Council chairman Alexander Lomaia said that Russian provocations and troop movements to reinforce their position in South Ossetia had placed them in what he called, ‘a Zugzwang, the chess move where you are compelled to move’. Tbilisi argued that Russian forces had moved into South Ossetia as violence in and shelling of the ethnic Georgian controlled areas round the breakaway enclave threatened the collapse of their government unless they reacted. Compelled to or not, the Georgians moved and the Georgians lost. Claims during the war of a ‘Russian invasion’ cost the Saakashvili government something more valuable than territory – its perceived integrity in international affairs.
In essence the war was the collision of three hubristic projects. The first was the Georgian hubris that it could crush two Russian mini-client states without consequences. The second was the American hubris that it could build client states out of core ex-Soviet states and integrate them into NATO without consequences. The third was the Russian hubris that it had a veto on the foreign policy choices of Georgia and Ukraine and could crush, invade and depose the leadership of an American client state without consequences. At the time, few outside ‘situations rooms’ in Russia and the West realized how close to a broader war the rivalries of the short Cold War had actually reached. If the Ukrainian ‘Orange’ president had decided to enforce his threat that the Russian fleet might not be allowed to return to its Crimean base that served as a support base during the war, the prospect of Russian troops entering Donetsk in Ukraine as well as Gori in Georgia was a real possibility.
In the bar of the Tbilisi Hotel Marriott on the night that the French President Nicholas Sarkozy flew in from Moscow with the terms of the ceasefire, one European diplomat mused, ‘power like water will find its level’, and of all three hubristic projects the Russian one was closest to the real power level. Giant posters in support of the South Ossetians were thrown up in Moscow emblazoned with the war’s start date ‘08.08.08’ and ‘Tskhinvali we are with you’. Though they claimed not to have goaded the Georgians into the war, Kremlin intellectuals began to talk, behind closed doors, of ‘Putin’s historical defeat of NATO expansion by force of arms’, or ‘the first ever direct Russian defeat of an American client state’. Weeks after the war, in a forest in eastern Siberia, Putin shot and tagged a tiger. Moving towards the beast knocked unconscious with a tranquilizer dart, he smirked, ‘She won’t forget us.’ Putin’s popularity rating had reached 83 per cent.78 The message was clear. Russia was back. This marked the peak of Putin’s popularity.
After the ceasefire I travelled over the front lines into South Ossetia on the back of a Russian military truck. There were burnt-out villages, ransacked post offices and shredded farmhouses. In the undergrowth there was a deep rot – the smell of death.
In the village cum capital, Tskhinvali, freshly pasted posters demanded: ‘Recognize the union with Russia’. Nothing had escaped the tears, chips and blast of this short, nasty war. Men in ill-fitting, unmatched camouflage outfits circled around in stolen cars from the southern villages. In the hills were roars and rumbles as the Russian Army cleared the last ordinance. Further back, shouts and the occasional crackle fired gleefully into the air. The militia pushed itself forward: ‘We gave it to them. They’ll never come again.’
Under the poplars, through the dusk on Stalin Street, militias drifted towards the megaphones; a ring of Russian tanks formed a semicircle around a Soviet town hall. It was a wreck, like everything else in Tskhinvali. Until a few weeks earlier this had been the government building of the unrecognized mini-state. Soon it would be the headquarters of a ‘government’ recognized by Moscow. This meant effective annexation. Behind the tanks, floodlights clacked on over the throng. Dignitaries in bad suits took their seats in front of the armour. ‘Is Putin coming?’ hissed the rumour. There was a rush to light the memorial candles spread over the steps of the ruined offices. Russian soldiers tied wrist ribbons – the Russian and Ossetia tricolour, as one. I climbed onto a tank to stand next to a young Russian trooper. ‘How do you feel?’ I asked. ‘Tired,’ he laughed.