Russia has long been a very pedagogical country. She likes to teach lessons to her neighbours. The smaller the neighbours, the more lessons they can expect to receive.
Through most of the 20th century, Russia was at her most expansive. Thanks to the Yalta settlements, and the miracle of nuclear weapons technology, the whole world became Russia’s “near abroad,” and various little countries of eastern and central Europe became her disciplined pupils. She taught us all lessons in dialectical materialism and scientific socialism, until she collapsed under the strain of it.
Vladimir Putin—the strongman of Russia, regardless of passing titles—is, in addition to being an old KGB officer thoroughly schooled in the ruthless barbarism of Communist power politics, also tsar from an older school of Russian imperialism. The notion that Russia—whose land area makes her by far the planet’s largest single state—could be threatened by a neighbour 1/245th her size, should not be confused with paranoia.
We need no more believe that, than believe that the large, fully-organized Russian military force that invaded Georgian sovereign territory over the weekend, while the world was watching the Olympics, was responding to a “provocation” by Georgia’s elected president, Mikheil Saakashvili. Unquestionably the latter has exercised poor practical judgment in dealing with the bear pawing at his little realm, but that is beside the point.
South Ossetia is a “pretext” if there ever was one. It is a tiny district of 70,000 souls on the southern face of the Caucasus ridge, whose people are ethnically related to the Ossetians over the mountains on the Russian side. There is genuine ethnic friction, which the Russians have been abetting in every way they can. Russian “peacekeepers” had already installed themselves in South Ossetia, distributing Russian passports among other illegitimate acts. The district has been, since 1992, a patchwork of villages in only some of which Georgian police are welcome, otherwise ruled by “separatist” thugs, who live off smuggling and Russian “aid” money.
The Georgians, had they known what was coming, could have delayed the Russian tank intrusion considerably by plugging the one road tunnel through the mountains. But that intrusion was itself only a theatrical flourish. Most of the Russian military operations appear to have been concentrated instead in Abkhazia, a larger Georgian “breakaway” district on the Black Sea to the west.
Russian troop movements to secure bridges and intersections within undisputed Georgian territory, showed careful planning. The attacks on Gori were designed not merely to cut links between the Georgian capital of Tbilisi, and South Ossetia, but also those between Tbilisi and the country’s west. While making a show of invading South Ossetia, the Russians were actually busy securing frontier positions between Abkhazia and the rest of Georgia.
President Saakashvili’s principal indiscretion was not his own alleged decision to use the Olympics as cover to attack “separatists” in South Ossetia. (That charge is perfectly plausible, incidentally.) It was rather Georgia’s application, alongside Ukraine’s, to join NATO.
That application has been accepted in principle, though it was stalled in practice by the French and Germans, in deference to their own dependence upon Russian supplies of oil and natural gas—falling prices for which were also neatly arrested by Russia’s weekend adventure.
The energy dimension is easily discerned: for Georgia hosts the longest section of the one pipe corridor that can carry oil drilled in Kazakhstan, across the southern Caspian Sea, and Azerbaijan, to international shipping terminals on the Black Sea—entirely outside Russian control.
Russia’s message to the neighbours in her “near abroad”—to Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan as well as Ukraine—was enunciated by the descent into Gori. Not only should such countries not think about making Western allies, they should remember that their oil exports can be choked at any moment, at Russia’s whim. Indeed, the Russian presence in South Ossetia puts them within a few kilometres’ walking of that oil jugular.
The whole issue may be discussed in “realpolitik” terms, and I have chosen not to do so. The West has long been committed to an idea of international law that is the antithesis of the idea long expounded by Russia. In the Western, essentially American, conception, the people of any country should be free to choose their own government, and that government in turn should be free to enter into whatever international arrangements it believes to be in its own national interest. Attempts at violent compulsion are to be resisted, collectively.
Compare, the Russian idea of a “near abroad”—of a poorly-defined and infinitely extendable area of Russian influence, in which smaller nation states must submit to methodical Russian bullying, or alternatively to direct Russian invasion.
On this question of principle, relations between Russia and the West must necessarily be confrontational. In the fullness of time, and God willing, it is we who have a lesson to teach them.
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