Russia’s statelets game

Sun, May 26 2013

Fri, Aug 21 2009 10:00 CET

byClive Leviev-Sawyer

49387 Views 19 Comments

1 of 1

MARITIME MOMENT: Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin, left, and president Dimitry Medvedev at a working meeting on August 14, two days after Putin visited Abkhazia on the anniversary of the Russia-Georgia conflict, in a signal gesture of Russia’s foreign policy intentions.

The visit to the breakaway Georgian region of Abkhazia by Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin on the August 12 anniversary of the Russia-Georgia conflict had "all the trappings of an emperor inspecting newly-acquired territory, with the Abkhaz leader obsequiously perching before him," a BBC reporter said.

While Tbilisi and Western leaders sharply condemned Putin’s visit as a sign of obstinate defiance by Moscow, not all analysts saw the visit as a sign that Russia should be regarded as inexorable in its seeking to expand and deepen its influence in the region.

Leading Bulgarian political scientist Ivan Krastev, in a brilliantly perceptive balance sheet on the political fallout of the August 2008 Russia-Georgia war published on the openDemocracy website, said that the Kremlin’s revisionism is the outcome of Moscow’s growing insecurity.

"The Russia of Vladimir Putin fears at the same time territorial disintegration and the loss of global relevance. Both of these fears are legitimate," Krastev said.

"The ultimate objective of the Kremlin’s current foreign policy is that if it cannot be strong, Russia should not look weak. In Putin’s words, ‘Russia will either be a great power or it will not be at all’," according to Krastev.

In Abkhazia, Putin – whose country was one of only two to recognise the statelets of Abkhazia and South Ossetia as independent after the August 2008 conflict – was steely in his statements. "Frankly speaking, Abkhazia doesn’t need to be recognised by anyone but Russia," he said, also announcing during the visit that Moscow would spend close to $500 million on military bases in Abkhazia, in effect bolstering the Russian military presence in a long-term investment including an alternative Black Sea port for the Russian fleet, and $330 million in economic and social spending.

Tbilisi said that the Putin visit would lead to destabilisation and an escalation of tensions in the Caucasus. The European Union, which played a significant role in the ceasefire deal brokered after the August 2008 conflict, said that it did not consider Putin’s visit to Abkhazia "compatible with the principle of territorial integrity nor helpful for the international efforts to stabilise the region".

The EU reiterated its support for Georgia’s sovereign and territorial integrity, the bloc said in a statement released hours after the visit.
The US state department used similar phrasing, with a spokesperson telling reporters: "The principal thing we are concerned about is the territorial integrity of Georgia. We think
Russian and regional countries should respect Georgia’s borders which have been recognised by the world".

The visit was followed six days later by Georgia formally terminating its membership of the Commonwealth of Independent States, the quasi-successor to the defunct Soviet Union, and more bizarrely, the emergence of news that Abkhazia had signed a contract costing a reported $30 000 a month with a Los Angeles-based public relations firm to boost the statelet’s image.

It is not, however, the statelet’s image that matters, given that – no matter what – it is obviously vastly more dependent on a sponsor than that other fledgling state about which Putin likes to accuse Washington and most EU states of hypocrisy, Kosovo.

Nor are many people outside the Kremlin likely to nod in agreement with Putin likening his pet Caucasus statelets to San Marino and Monaco which he described as similarly to the Georgian breakaway territories having "special relations with their neighbours".

More profound is the point made by Krastev that Russia’s strong military response in August 2008 had brought in its wake strategic losses, given that the war had not made the Caucasus more secure, and Moscow’s recognition of South Ossetia and Abkhazia had increased the risks of instability in the region.

"Now that Russia has more clearly become a revisionist power, feared and resisted by its neighbours, its stance and rhetoric (including the claim of interest in protecting the rights of its compatriots in the post Soviet Union) had profoundly changed the way Russian minorities are perceived in the ‘near abroad," Krastev said.

In an interview with the BBC, Edward Lucas, an Economist writer and the author of a book The New Cold War said that Russia did not want to recreate the old Soviet empire, because that was expensive to maintain, brittle and troublesome, but wanted as Russian president Dimitry Medvedev had put it, "a zone of privileged interest in which they have a de facto veto on everything important and a very close eye on what happens".

The BBC quoted Neil MacFarlane, professor of international relations at Oxford, as saying that "to judge from what the Russians say about their space, they are operating on a 19th century theory of international relations which is based on the distribution of power, on competition between great powers, on the need to secure preponderant influence over contested spaces.

"We may be living post-historically. Russia is not," MacFarlane said.