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.
http://www.sofiaecho.com/2009/08/21/772320_russias-statelets-game