On a sunny afternoon earlier this summer in the garden of a freshly renovated resort overlooking the Black Sea, a group of Russian security-service and Interior Ministry officers on holiday were raising their vodka glasses. The toast: to their future summers in the separatist republic of Abkhazia, once a favorite holiday spot for Stalin’s elite and now, despite its nominal independence from Georgia, Russia’s newest colony. After a war in 2008 to help Abkhazia and South Ossetia partition themselves from Georgia, Russia ...