Ambassador Habsburgshvili

The Habsburgs' new empire

The princess and the bear
Feb 18th 2010
From The Economist print edition


Europe’s aristocracy, alive and kicking

GEORGIA struggles to make its case in Germany, which sees trade ties with Russia as vital and the ex-Soviet Caucasian republic as troublesome. So who better to burnish Georgia’s image there than a German-educated Habsburg? Georgia’s new ambassador to Berlin, once she presents her credentials to the president next month, will be Gabriela Maria Charlotte Felicitas Elisabeth Antonia von Habsburg-Lothringen, princess Imperial and Archduchess of Austria, Princess Royal of Hungary and Bohemia. A name like that, says Georgia’s president Mikheil Saakashvili, should open doors.

The towering figure on the Berlin diplomatic scene is the Russian ambassador to Germany, Vladimir Kotenev, an indefatigable socialite who runs what is probably the biggest embassy in Europe. Ms von Habsburg (the name she prefers) will not, despite her titles, have the cash to match his efforts. But she may still help Germans think again about Georgia’s European roots and future. Born in Luxembourg, brought up in Germany and Austria, the polyglot Ms von Habsburg is an avant-garde sculptor, specialising in large steel outdoor works. She has lived in Georgia since 2001, has become a Georgian citizen and gained a command of the language (it is “improving every day”, says Mr Saakashvili).

By the standards of her family, a spot of diplomacy in Berlin is not particularly exotic. The heirs to the Habsburg emperors helped speed the downfall of the Soviet empire, particularly by arranging the cross-border exodus from Hungary to Austria in the summer of 1989 that punched the first big hole in the iron curtain. Among Ms von Habsburg’s six siblings, her younger sister Walpurga is a leading conservative politician in Sweden; her brother Georg is an ambassador-at-large for Hungary. Another used to be in the European Parliament.

Her father, Otto von Habsburg, now aged 97, is one of very few who can remember the Austro-Hungarian empire (his father, Karl, was its last emperor and it collapsed when Otto was six). He does not mourn the demise of that world: liberated from court etiquette, he says, he can call someone an “idiot” if he wants, instead of “your excellency”. His daughter may find German diplomatic protocol rather more constraining.

War memorials

Europe.view

Respect for the dead
Jan 7th 2010
From Economist.com


The messy politics of war memorials

WAR cemeteries are poignant places, better suited for reflection than controversy. In Vilnius, Poles, Lithuanians, Russians and others, all fierce foes in their day, rest in the same hallowed ground. In the British war cemetery in Berlin, aircrews lie in the earth that their bombs once churned. In Bitola in Macedonia, a huge German war memorial-cum-cemetery dating from the first world war glowers over the town from a nearby hill. Rebecca West, a Germanophobe British writer of the interwar period, called it “monstrous”. Local authorities have been more generous-spirited, leaving it untouched for nearly 90 years.

Some war memorials make no political statement. The Thiepval Memorial on the Somme, designed by Edwin Lutyens, bears the names of 72,000 fallen British soldiers from the 1914-18 war. It does not try to say anything about the origins of the war or who won it. British memorials usually bear an epitaph on the lines of this: “When you go home, tell them of us and say, ‘for their tomorrow, we gave our today’.” That may strike the modern eye as a bit maudlin, but nobody could find it offensive.

The Soviet war memorials in Vienna and Berlin, in contrast, are built in the hearts of each city with demonstrative and meticulous attention to Stalinist iconography and cliché. “Eternal Glory to the Heroes of the Red Army, fallen in the fight against the German-fascist invaders for the freedom and independence of Europe” reads the inscription on the Viennese one, in Schwarzenbergplatz.

Given what actually happened in the Soviet-occupied part of Europe after 1945, views may differ on the merits of that inscription. Some Austrians, ungratefully, nicknamed it the “Looter’s memorial” or the “Unknown rapist”. Some have tried to blow it up or otherwise vandalise it. But it is protected by law, dating from the 1955 treaty in which Austria regained its independence from the liberator-occupiers.



When the Soviet Union collapsed, the former Soviet republics were under no such legal requirement to preserve or protect war memorials. That gives them more freedom of manoeuvre, though whether they use it wisely is another matter. In 2007 Estonia abruptly moved a Soviet war memorial from a conspicuous position in the centre of Tallinn to the military cemetery on the capital’s outskirts, provoking riots among local Russians who saw the move as blasphemy towards past generations’ sacrifice and heroism. Though the government’s tactics and timing were indeed questionable, the motivation was understandable—for Estonians the statue epitomised their country’s 50-year occupation, during which its own military memorials had been obliterated.

In December Georgia took things a step further when it demolished a colossal 46m-high Soviet war memorial in Kutaisi, the country’s second city. Bungled use of explosives killed two bystanders, a mother and child. The official, somewhat contradictory, explanation was that the monument needed restoration and in any case stood on a site needed for a new building to house the country’s parliament.

It is easy to see why Soviet monuments are resented in places that see themselves as former captive nations of the evil empire. Railing against them may win votes. But vindictiveness is not a good policy. Relocating monuments to neutral locations, preferably with proper consultation, no haste, and all due decency, is one thing. Cheerfully destroying them is another.

Respecting different approaches to the past is a hallmark of a free plural society just as forcibly rewriting it is a hallmark of totalitarianism. That does not make monuments sacrosanct (you will search in vain for a German military cemetery with a swastika). But the dead deserve to be treated with respect, however flawed or horrible the cause in which they died.

Europe view 145, Georgia one year on

EUROPE

Europe.view

The fog of war
Aug 13th 2009
From Economist.com


Unravelling the Ossetia conflict, one year later
ONE year after the Georgian war, its outcome is as debatable as the cause. Depending on where you stand, the war can be seen as the sinister culmination of a systematic provocation by a neo-imperialist Russia or as a murderously aggressive gambit by a Caucasian strongman wrongheadedly backed by the West.

The truth is somewhere in between. Russia did systematically provoke Georgia in the months leading up to the war. Its military counter-attack was disproportionate. But it is hard to avoid the conclusion that President Mikheil Saakashvili’s inner circle was badly penetrated by Russia, that decision-making processes were chaotic and amateurish, and that the move to retake the South Ossetian capital, Tskhinvali (pictured), played into his enemy’s hands.

EPA

Whose fault was it?




With a detailed chronology of who did and decided what in the days and hours leading up to the war still (oddly) unavailable, an accurate assessment of the causes of war is still impossible.

Depending on where you stand, what happened next is similarly foggy. One variant is that Nicolas Sarkozy, the president of France, intervened with panache and elan to prevent catastrophe, brokering a ceasefire deal in a way that only a big European country could have done. From another viewpoint, Mr Sarkozy was a meddling egomaniac whose amateurism and self-importance gravely impeded the EU’s ability to intervene. People familiar with ceasefires in the Yugoslav wars certainly thought the documents he brought away from the talks with Vladimir Putin (and his sidekick-boss Dmitri Medvedev) were remarkably vague.

From another point of view, the EU and NATO reaped the harvest of their neglect of Georgia in previous months. The agreed sanctions after the fighting stopped were feeble. Suspending the NATO-Russia council, or the putative Partnership and Cooperation Agreement between the EU and Russia, was not even turning a cold shoulder (more a soggy one) to the Kremlin. The outside world showed it would sacrifice principle for profit. It just requires a decent interval.

Lenin’s famous dictum “Kto kovo” (“who did what to whom”) is the best way of clearing the fog. Georgia is weakened, but not destroyed. Its economy has not collapsed. Political pluralism survives. War-weariness has not brought a pro-Moscow regime to power. Even Mr Saakashvili’s erstwhile friends are heartily fed-up with his presidency, but Georgian politics is still commendably open and contestable.

That cannot be said of Russia. The war has made apparent to outsiders some of the worst features of Russian politics. The Kremlin propaganda machine has used it to stoke xenophobia: Saakashvili is a monster, it says, so the West is monstrously cynical in backing him. Yet Russia has not pursued military aggression elsewhere. Fears for the future of Crimea and the Baltic states, vivid a year ago, now seem overblown. The military adventure in Georgia was bad, but it was a one-off. If it will be repeated anywhere, it will be once more in Georgia. And confident predictions of that, earlier this year, have come to nothing.

One reason for that is that the West has not abandoned Georgia. For all the frustration with the administration’s autocratic tendencies, and despite all the pressing priorities elsewhere, the core commitment to Georgia is intact. America’s “reset” of relations with Russia did not uninstall the program “Georgia 1.0”. Partly because of the principle of defending sovereignty, partly out of enthusiasm for Georgia’s political and economic achievements, and partly because of energy politics (remember the pipelines), America and Europe are staying engaged.

Not that anybody has worked out what to do. Not giving up is a good start, but only that.

Moldova/Georgia

Protests in Moldova and Georgia

Street scenes
Apr 16th 2009
From The Economist print edition


Moldova’s crackdown, like Georgia’s standoff, leaves protesters fuming

IDEALISTIC youngsters demanding their country’s faster integration with Europe were a rarity even before the Moldovan authorities beat and jailed hundreds, and killed two, after a spree of protests against electoral fraud. But the limp European Union reaction to the crackdown will not encourage others to follow in their footsteps.

Few emerge with credit from the protests. Some participants rioted, storming and burning public buildings. The opposition parties loosely linked to the protesters are a lightweight lot with some questionable leaders. What unites them is anger over alleged ballot-rigging in the April 5th parliamentary election. The ruling Communists (in reality, a centre-right party) would probably have won even without bullying their rivals, skewing media coverage and inflating voter lists. With half the vote, they took 60 of the 101 seats in the unicameral parliament. This week, the government began an election recount.




Although the government consists mainly of competent technocrats, the crisis has shown that real power lies with President Vladimir Voronin, who is due to step down soon, and his cronies. The official reaction was striking, both in its brutality and in the contempt it showed for the EU, a large donor to Moldova, Europe’s poorest country. The authorities barred Western diplomats from visiting detainees. A limited UN-led investigation of 90 people in one jail found evidence of severe beatings and “inhuman” conditions. The corpse of Valeriu Boboc, a 23-year-old protester, was returned to his parents covered in bruises; the authorities say he was poisoned. A Moldovan journalist, Natalia Morar, is under house arrest. Amnesty International is championing her cause.

On April 15th Mr Voronin called unconvincingly for an amnesty for the protesters. In fact he blames foreigners, particularly Romania, which before the war included most of present-day Moldova. A vocal minority in Moldova wants reunification, partly for nationalist reasons and partly to speed up progress towards entry into the EU. The Romanian president, Traian Basescu, has ordered an acceleration in the issue of passports to Moldovans. The mutual hatred between him and Mr Voronin (who sees dual citizenship with Romania as treason) is intense. Moldova has brought in visas for Romanians, expelled the Romanian ambassador and stopped Romanian journalists entering the country. The (Latvian-born) director of the National Democratic Institute, an American outfit, faces deportation.

The EU is quietly trying to act as an intermediary, but some diplomats say its intervention could make things worse. Russia is dangling a deal over Moldova’s most industrialised region, Transdniestria, whose separatist regime it sponsors. This is meant to encourage Mr Voronin to lean east. Against this background, Moldova’s pro-Western camp finds the EU’s reaction to the attack on the protesters spineless.

The feeble international response to the behaviour of the Moldovan authorities contrasts with events in another ex-Soviet republic, Georgia. Opposition demonstrators there have been demanding the resignation of President Mikheil Saakashvili. Having blundered in a heavy-handed crackdown against similar protests in November 2007, the Georgians handled this week’s demonstrations with punctilious attention to outside opinion. That cuts little ice with the opposition, which believes that Mr Saakashvili is authoritarian, nepotistic and incompetent. The main evidence for this last charge is his disastrous war with Russia last summer. But by ex-Soviet standards, Georgia’s economy is strong and its political system free and open.

The Georgian opposition has several heavyweight ex-allies of Mr Saakashvili. They include a former speaker of parliament, Nino Burjanadze, a former foreign minister, Salome Zourabichvili, and a former ambassador to the United Nations, Irakli Alasania. Even if they squabble, that is a galaxy of talent compared with Moldova. Many of Georgia’s foreign well-wishers are fed up with the erratic behaviour of the president. But for now at least most Georgians prefer imperfect stability to revolutionary upheaval.

Europe view 106 Perfidy from Albion

Britain needs to stiffen its spine when dealing with the Kremlin

AFTER the Russian-Georgian war, Britain stood out as the only big European country willing to talk tough to the Kremlin. On August 27th in Kyiv, David Miliband, the foreign secretary, berated Russia for its “unilateral attempt to redraw the map” and spoke of “the moment when countries are required to set out where they stand”. Britain was a big part of a coalition—which also included Sweden, Poland, the Czech Republic and the Baltic states—that stiffened the European Union’s position on freezing talks on a new partnership and cooperation agreement with Russia.

In London, the Foreign Office started a thorough review of Britain’s Russia policy, drawing on planners at the Ministry of Defence, the spooks of MI6, the spy-catchers of MI5, and other government experts. “Project Russia”, as the review was named, also invited selected outsiders (but not this columnist) to contribute. The process was secret and so is the result.



One aim was to nail down what motivates the Russian authorities: are they nationalists salving their country’s wounded pride, aggressive mercantilists, a criminal conspiracy of ex-spooks, or all, none or a mixture of the above? The other was to work out what Britain should do about it: contain, engage, counter-attack and ignore were among the options considered.

But hopes that the British establishment had finally decided to take a tough line have been dashed. Gordon Brown, the prime minister, wants above all to strengthen his alliance with the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy. Both men want to launch a big global financial reform. Mr Sarkozy wants the Nice summit this month to be a success, where he can declare that the EU is ready to relaunch talks with Russia. So Britain has switched sides and backed him, infuriating its former allies.

Critics say that Russia is not allowing EU monitors to operate in Georgia’s separatist enclaves of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Russia has bolstered its military presence there to far above pre-war levels. The extra troops have not stopped the ethnic cleansing of many thousands of civilians from these territories.

So shouldn’t the EU at least maintain its modest freeze on relations with Russia until the end of the year? That might also give the West a bit more clout in efforts to persuade Georgia’s increasingly erratic president, Mikheil Saakashvili, to talk more to the opposition and less about a renewed military build-up. Those arguments apparently count for nothing with Mr Sarkozy—or with Mr Brown, who has flatly overruled his officials.

Britain is also neglecting its soft power in Russia. The BBC Russian service, already sadly diminished in listeners, transmitters, and editorial clout, is being pruned again, shedding eight staff (including, some fear, the journalists who are the sharpest critics of the Kremlin). Carefully crafted features will give way to cheaper phone-ins. A beefed-up website is some compensation—but most Russians, especially in the provinces, have no access to the internet. A protest letter from Britain’s best-known Russia-watchers is gathering signatures. Don’t get your hopes up.

And “Project Russia”? Its voluminous pages call for “robustness” and “resilience”. It recommends more British attention to countries threatened by Russia. That may be good news for Norway, for example, which feels its allies have failed to help in the “High North”.

The most interesting bit is probably the recommendation that Britain should actively seek out coalitions of like-minded countries to counter Russian mischief-making. But for this to work, Britain itself must look credible. Mr Brown’s cynical deal with Mr Sarkozy, and a sense of general squishiness on Russia lately, have created the opposite impression.

Nino's 43 Questions

read this and ask yourself why no similar debate is happening in Russia

Burjanadze’s 43 War Questions
Civil Georgia, Tbilisi / 2 Oct.'08 / 02:16

On October 1, former parliamentary chairperson, Nino Burjanadze, said she had 43 questions on which she wanted answers from the authorities over the August war with Russia:

Before the War

The Russian forces have launched preparations for possible military operation against Georgia since spring, 2008. The culmination came in July, when the Russia’s 58th Army held military exercises with the scenario to repel Georgian aggression against so called South Ossetia and to destroy the enemy forces on its territory. The Georgian drone has been downed, Russia has increased its military contingent [in Abkhazia] and there was a significant increase in anti-Georgian military rhetoric.
• Why the Georgian authorities could not foresee anticipated consequence and did not prevent direct military confrontation with Russia?
• Why the Georgia’s National Security Council did not revise the national security concept and define new threats and failed to set out ways to neutralize them?
• Why the action plan of the General Staff of the Armed Forces did not envisage possibility of Russia’s large-scale military intervention in the conflict regions?
• Why the advantage of the Russia’s air forces was not taken into consideration?
• Why the decision was taken on launching large-scale military actions, despite the fact that Georgia’s friendly states have been numerously and directly warning [Georgia] – not to yield to Russia’s provocations?
• Was there any alternative plan to avert further escalation of the conflict and why the plans were rejected?
• Was the 2004-2008 armament policy of the Ministry of Defense in the line of Georgia’s strategic and tactical goals and tasks?
Launch of Military Actions
Today the Georgian authorities state that Georgia went into the Russian trap. The major issue is – did the authorities do their utmost for not going into that trap.
• What was the military and political goals of the military actions: “restoration of the constitutional order;” “neutralization of armed gangs;” “protection of the Georgian population from the separatists’ aggression;” “neutralization of Russia’s aggression;” “toppling of the separatist regime;” or there was other goals?
• Who has given the order to launch the military operation and why? How this decision was taken and was this decision discussed at the National Security Council? Were the preliminary consultations held over this decision within the country and internationally – with whom and what was their [those with whom consultations were potentially held] opinion?
• If Russia’s military aggression was inevitable, why the Georgian authorities did not take measures for evacuation of women and children from the Tskhinvali and Gori districts and why they [civilians] were left alone to face Russian, Ossetian and North Caucasian marauders?

Combat Process

Despite billions spent [on defense] and four-year long active preparation, it was possible to carry out combat activities only for four days. More questions have been triggered in the society during this period of time, rather than answers.

• Who has in particular planned, who was tasked and who was in fact in charge of the military operation?
• Units of which structure participated in the combat activities in the direction of Tskhinvali and how effective was their coordination and interaction?
• What was the level of interference of civilian officials in the combat operations and command? In what capacity was Mayor of Tbilisi [Gigi Ugulava] in the combat zone and what was the reason that he was charged with announcing temporary ceasefire?
• In what capacity did the Parliamentary Chairman [Davit Bakradze] called on the population in live televised address for carrying out guerilla warfare against the Russian occupiers, while the military units were ordered to retreat? Did this call contain additional threat for the population? Was this decision supported by the National Security Council and what military and financial resources have been mobilized to support the population?
• What was the strategic goal of attacking Tskhinvali with all the forces and why other more strategic directions for gaining military advantage were ignored – including blocking the Roki Tunnel, as well as capturing the separatists’ strongholds and heights – Java, Khetaguri, Tsveriakho, Sarabuki, Zeda [upper] and Kveda [lower] Roki etc?
• What was the reason and who ordered sending thousands of reservists in Gori? Who was in charge of their action plan and who was in command?
• Why hidden communication systems were not secured in the combat theater and why orders were given through mobile phone?
• Were the secret services aware of the planned Russian incursion on the Abkhazia-Samegrelo direction and why there was no defense line on the Enguri river?
• Is there civil defense system in the country and why the civil defense mechanisms did not work in parallel to the combat operations?
• Did the President’s statement made in live televised address that most of the army and armament was preserved and hidden in the woods, amount to revealing the state secret and did it contain the threat?
• Why did the logistics fail and why did the problem of logistics of the reserve troops emerge in such a brief war?
• Were those officials, who have left the civilian population, hold accountable?

Retreat

The Georgian armed forces started disorganized retreat and stopped resisting the enemy few days after the launch of the combat operations.

• Who ordered and what was the reason of the order to stop resisting?
• In the process of retreating, was there any red line beyond which the Georgian military units would have resumed resistance, or the decision was made for a total capitulation?
• Why was not the plan of retreat and evacuation of civilians worked out and why the process of retreat was chaotic, which resulted into seizure of large number of military hardware and armament by the enemy?
• Why was the strategic Kodori Gorge – which from the military point of view is regarded to be almost impossible to capture – left without any battle, despite the fact that there was the Interior Ministry’s special purpose unit?
• In the process of retreat, was there any order to destroy or to save the military hardware and if there was any order, why was not the large number of military resource destroyed, which eventually was seized by the enemy?
• Why was not the full evacuation of Poti navy base, Senaki 2nd brigade; Gori tank, artillery and 3rd brigades carried out and why the large number of expansive equipment, ammunition and arms left in the hands of the enemy?
• Based on what did the President tell the residents of Tbilisi that he would have warned them 12 hours prior in case of any threat of attack on Tbilisi, while the Russian air force could have carried out air strikes on the capital city at any time and while the Russian tanks were at Igoeti and could have carried out attack on Tbilisi in maximum two hours?
• What was the authorities’ plan and how well the capital city was protected, if there was no timely international (EU, U.S.) intervention?

After the War

The Georgian villages in Didi and Patara Liakhvi gorges [in breakaway South Ossetia] have been torched as a result of the war. Tens of thousands of people have been displaced. Significant part of Georgia’s territories – including Kodori and Akhalgori - have been lost even for a longer time; the country has in general suffered huge economic damage. Numerous families have been devastated.

• Do the authorities acknowledge that restoration of Georgia’s territorial integrity has become more difficult now than it was before the war and that the problem resolution has been postponed for an indefinite period of time?
• Who must be held responsible for the political, military and economic consequences of the war?
• While the issue of accountability of lower level officials and military commanders has been arias, why the top level officials and military commanders are not held accountable?
• Why do we have so many unknown fallen soldiers in the four-day war?
• Why the Georgian authorities hidden from the population gathered at the mass rally [outside the Parliament] that the occupiers took over Kodori Gorge on that very same morning?
• Why the condition of refugees is still extremely difficult despite the fact that Georgia has been provided huge assistance?
• Who assessed and based on which data that Georgia’s damage amounted to GEL 1 billion?
• What is the authorities’ plan if Russia decides to use against Georgia economic leverages, including through use of the capital openly or covertly owned by Russia in Georgia?
• Why the following documents signed by the Georgian authorities are not publicly accessible for the Georgian population:
o The August 12 Medvedev-Sarkozy [six-point] plan;
o Clarification of this agreement [sent by the French President to his Georgian counterpart];
o A letter of the Georgian President on non-resumption of hostilities;
o A letter of the Georgian President sent to President Medvedev about Abkhazia (the so called Abkhazia partition plan, or peace plan).

• Why the Georgian authorities are spending millions of Lari on various entertainment events and PR campaigns, while the President, at the same time, calls on the world for a financial aid for Georgia?
• Why did not the authorities create an investigative commission on the August events and instead why they set up a temporary parliamentary commission – rights of which are more restricted – through violation of law?
• Based on what the announcements are being made that “we have won,” while our territories are occupied and in addition we have lost Kodori and Akhalgori, which have never before been under the control of separatists?
• Do the authorities realize defeat in the war and do they take further strategic decisions based on this assumption?

Russia and its neighbours

Bang, crash

Sep 18th 2008
From The Economist print edition


What Russia’s stockmarket collapse means for Russia and for its neighbours

EVER since Vladimir Putin and his ex-KGB friends came to power in Russia, they have had one big advantage: a booming economy, rising prices for oil and gas exports, and strong capital inflows from abroad. All of a sudden, that has changed.

Partly as a result of the storm hitting all emerging markets (see article) and partly because of jumpy nerves following the war with Georgia, the markets in Moscow have been crashing. On September 17th and 18th the authorities halted trading in shares and bonds after the benchmark RTS share index fell 21% earlier in the week. It is down nearly 60% since its peak in May. The finance ministry pledged $60 billion to prop up the banking system; much of it seems to have gone offshore.

As regulators and politicians in Moscow struggle to contain the damage, and firms worry about bonds due later this year, a big question is how the economic turmoil will affect Russian politics at home and its policies abroad. Optimists hope the market wobbles will mean a less abrasive anti-Western foreign policy and the restarting of reforms. Others fear that the Kremlin will respond with tighter controls at home and a still tougher stance abroad.

Modernising reforms largely stopped in the final years of Mr Putin’s presidency, as the Kremlin sought to control the country’s oil and gas industry, and to silence critics. His successor, Dmitry Medvedev, made promising speeches on corruption and legal reform, but has not acted on them. Andrei Piontkovsky, a sharp-tongued Russian commentator, says the struggle among Kremlin clans is between “global kleptocrats” who want to be part of the world economy and “national kleptocrats” with cruder domestic interests.

For now, Russia shows no sign of softening on Georgia. It has said international monitors cannot operate in South Ossetia (whose independence is recognised only by Russia and Nicaragua) without permission of authorities there. It insists that South Ossetia, and the other breakaway region, Abkhazia, must participate in upcoming talks in Geneva on settling the conflict. Georgia says it will not attend if the separatists are there.

Russia has also accused NATO of showing “cold war reflexes” after a visit to Georgia by the alliance’s secretary-general, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer. He said that Georgia’s “road to NATO remained wide open”, without giving specifics.

Ukraine, meanwhile, faces not only a financial crisis but also a political one exacerbated by the war in Georgia. The governing coalition has collapsed after a row between Viktor Yushchenko, the president, and his former ally, Yulia Tymoshenko, the prime minister. Her party is moving towards an alliance with the grouping led by Viktor Yanukovich, once the Kremlin-backed candidate who was blocked from the presidency by the pro-democracy “orange revolution” of 2004.

Mr Yushchenko says Mrs Tymoshenko is selling out to Moscow; she says he has dangerously inflamed relations with Russia. Some fear that the Kremlin is exploiting Ukraine’s political weaknesses. But the country’s politicians seem to be doing enough damage without outside help.

Thoughts on Friedman (Europe View no 98)

The weakness of the West

Sep 11th 2008

From Economist.com

Russia is on the front foot now—but not for ever

EVEN the most sanguine political observers would concede that dealing with a resurgent Russia may require a bit of a rethink. But George Friedman, the founder of Stratfor, a consultancy sometimes dubbed the “shadow CIA”, has floated a starker idea. In the latest New York Review of Books, he contends that the recent war between Russia and Georgia shows that the balance of power in Eurasia has already shifted—and sharply against the West.

His argument goes as follows. Vladimir Putin wanted both to re-establish the credibility of the Russian army as a fighting force and to show that Western security relationships mean nothing in the face of Russian power. The first was a close call (only hasty reinforcements allowed a victory over the Georgian army). But the second has been successful. Humiliating a close American ally has revealed the West’s weakness. The lesson of the war, writes Mr Friedman, is that “while the United States is tied down in the Middle East, American guarantees have no value.”

Moreover, American denunciations of the attack on Georgia have played into Russia’s hands, by contrasting bombastic rhetoric with empty actions. Does America really want Russia to sell modern air-defence systems to Iran and Syria, endangering Israel’s ability to defend itself? If not, America had better forget Georgia. Europe barely rates a mention, with almost no military expeditionary capability and growing gas dependency on Russia.

In short, Mr Friedman concludes, Russia has “backed America into a corner”. Every country in the region is now re-evaluating its links with Moscow. Russia is using the window of opportunity created by Iraq and Afghanistan to assert a “new reality”.

Is that right? Mr Friedman’s argument is lucid, but incomplete. The West still sells one thing that is not made in Russia: respectability. That matters to the class that Andrei Piontkovsky, a Russian commentator, calls “global kleptocrats”. They want their businesses audited, lawyered and banked by blue-chip Western respectability-merchants. Dubai, Mumbai and Shanghai may offer that eventually, but not yet. Restricting the sale of respectability while the West still has some in stock would be a powerful sanction.

The best route is to start off with sanctions against any business or individual doing business in South Ossetia or Abkhazia. That will establish scrutiny mechanisms (such as visa denials and financial blacklists) that can then be applied more broadly once they are running smoothly.

Secondly, the West still has soft power. The Russian consulate in New York is not besieged by Americans wanting to emigrate. Large numbers of Russians, especially middle-class ones, have that option under active consideration. The Kremlin propaganda machine may be doing a good job in persuading the public that Russia is in the right and even that living conditions are improving. But it has not succeeded in persuading the public that life in Russia is good. And how could it? Corruption is rampant, infrastructure crumbling, public services disgraceful. The West can do a better job of highlighting that.

Thirdly, Europe does count. Russia may be able to use its relationship with countries such as Italy and Germany to veto use of the sticks, but it cannot stop Europe offering some juicy carrots to the countries now being squeezed by Russia. Places like Belarus, Moldova and Ukraine are admittedly hard to help, but the task is not impossible.

In short, it is not (quite) as bad as Mr Friedman argues. The Russian geopolitical counterattack may falter because of internal divisions within the squabbling Kremlin elite. If not, it will prove self-limiting: the more it succeeds, the more opposition it arouses. But expect a nasty few months or years in the meantime.

George Friedman on Georgia

This article in the NYRB caught my attention and is strongly recommended

Georgia and the Balance of Power

By George Friedman

The Russian invasion of Georgia has not changed the balance of power in Eurasia. It has simply announced that the balance of power had already shifted. The United States has been absorbed in its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as potential conflict with Iran and a destabilizing situation in Pakistan. It has no strategic ground forces in reserve and is in no position to intervene on the Russian periphery. This has opened an opportunity for the Russians to reassert their influence in the former Soviet sphere. Moscow did not have to concern itself with the potential response of the United States or Europe; hence, the balance of power had already shifted, and it was up to the Russians when to make this public. They did that on August 8.

read more

Russia-Georgia-France (from Economist.com)

Russia and the West

A deal, for now
Sep 9th 2008
From Economist.com


Europe shores up the Russian-Georgian ceasefire agreement

HUMILIATION avoided, but hardly a triumph: that is the upshot of President Nicolas Sarkozy’s talks in Moscow on Monday September 9th, where he tried to get the Kremlin to implement in full a French-brokered ceasefire that ended Russia’s war with Georgia.

After sometimes stormy talks, Mr Sarkozy, accompanied by the European Union’s nominal foreign-policy chief, Javier Solana, and the EU commission’s president, José Manuel Barroso, gained agreement on the withdrawal of Russian troops from a buffer zone established around the two breakaway regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Russia (but so far almost nobody else) has recognised both places as independent states.

Russian forces will leave positions around the port of Poti within a week, and pull back from the rest of the buffer zone ten days after EU monitors are deployed, which must be by October 1st. Yet that is pretty much what Mr Sarkozy thought he had gained in the first ceasefire agreement, which envisaged (at least in Western eyes) troops from both sides moving back promptly to their pre-conflict positions.

Mr Sarkozy said that the deal, if honoured, would allow the resumption, presumably in October, of talks between the EU and Russia on a new partnership agreement. The decision of an emergency European summit was to suspend these talks amid unprecedented displeasure with Russia for its invasion of Georgia and recognition of the breakaway regions.

Yet the coming weeks offer plenty of scope for quibbling and foot-dragging. Russia has repeatedly accused Georgia of breaking the ceasefire agreement: that could be one pretext. Another could be any signs of American help to rebuild the shattered remnants of the Georgian army—which the Kremlin refers to hyperbolically as “Georgia’s military machine”. Russia also wants the Georgian leadership to sign a binding agreement renouncing the use of force to recover the lost territories. The EU says it will guarantee this. It also wants Mikheil Saakashvili, Georgia’s president, to stand trial for war crimes. It is unclear whether a 200-strong EU force will be able to patrol inside the breakaway regions.

Blame for the muddle rests partly with France, currently in charge of the EU. Mr Sarkozy allowed two different versions of the vaguely worded ceasefire agreement to circulate, with ambiguous translations on a key issue: whether Russia is allowed to provide security “in” the breakaway regions, or “for” them.

The latest agreement also allows Russia to maintain many more troops in South Ossetia and Abkhazia than before the conflict. Western diplomats say that insisting on a reduction to pre-war levels is unrealistic. None of that is much comfort for the Georgian leadership, which is coping with tens of thousands of refugees and a nose-diving economy. Russian pressure for his departure may have shored up Mr Saakashvili’s position for now, but behind the scenes Georgian politicians are manoeuvring to replace him.

The worst east-west row for more than two decades may have stopped hotting up, but it is not cooling off much. Russia is sending a flotilla headed by one of its largest warships, Peter the Great, a nuclear-powered cruiser, to the Caribbean for joint manoeuvres with Venezuela, America’s most pungent adversary in the region. That follows the deployment of a handful of American naval ships to deliver humanitarian aid to Georgia. America has suspended a deal with Russia that would have allowed companies from both countries to invest in each other’s nuclear industry.

Russia may be betting that Europe and America cannot stay focused on Georgia for long. Russian help is needed on a range of other global issues, from Afghanistan to Iran. The EU and NATO are both deeply divided on Russia, with countries such as Italy loudly opposing sanctions of any kind, and others such as Germany highly mindful of Russia’s role as an energy supplier. A more hawkish camp, including Britain, Sweden, Poland and the Baltic states, want a fundamental rethink of relations with Russia. But even proponents of that admit that the costs will be high, and the benefits distant.

James Sherr

Talks to The Economist audio (ie me) here

Daily Telegraph: Putin's pipeline to power

Russia is fighting a new Cold War with banks and pipelines, not tanks and warplanes

By Edward Lucas

In classical mythology, Georgia was the land where the Argonauts had to harness bulls with bronze hooves to win the Golden Fleece. Modern Georgia is the source of a treasure scarcely less precious: oil and gas from central Asia and the Caspian, piped along the only east-west energy corridor that Russia does not control. But whereas Jason and his comrades triumphed, our quest has ended in humiliating failure.

As the occupying power in Georgia, Russia can close or destroy those pipelines whenever it wishes. The only country in the region that even came close to sharing Western values, one vital for our energy security, has been humiliatingly defeated and dismembered.


As politicians and voters in the free world return from their holidays, two big questions require answering. What happens next? And how do we stop it?

Decoding the Kremlin’s precise intentions is as tricky now as it was in the days of Kremlinology – a discipline as archaic as Morse code. But the outlines are clear.

Russia wants to recreate a “lite” version of the Soviet empire in eastern Europe and to neutralise the rest of the continent. Unlike the old Cold War, military action is a last resort: for the most part, it is banks and pipelines, not tanks and warplanes, that are doing the dirty work.

This may sound strange, given what has happened in Georgia. But it is vital to realise that this was not the beginning of a new Russian push, but part of something that began in the mid-1990s.

Russia has nobbled Belarus – the only other country, apart from the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip, that is ready to recognise the new statelets of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. It props up the narco-state of Tajikistan, cossets the dictatorship in Uzbekistan and woos the benighted despots of Turkmenistan. It has a cautious alliance with China, in the form of the Shanghai Co-operation Organisation, an outfit dedicated to fighting “extremism, terrorism and separatism” (although this last “-ism” has evidently been forgotten when it comes to Georgia).

It has stitched up energy deals in North Africa; it flirts with Iran and sells weapons to Hugo Chavez, the America-hating windbag who runs Venezuela. And by using energy diplomacy and divide-and-rule tactics, it is stitching up Europe country by country, from Cyprus to the Netherlands.

And it works. Over the crisis in Georgia, Europe has shown astonishing softness. The leaders of the EU have been all but invisible.

Where is the supposed foreign-policy chief, Javier Solana? Or the foreign-affairs commissioner, Benita Ferrero-Waldner? Meanwhile, Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, has been humiliated by the blatant Russian breaches of the ceasefire agreement that he negotiated. Europe’s weakness is the result of multiple forms of soft-headedness and short-sightedness.

Partly it is simple anti-Americanism: if Vladimir Putin is making life difficult for George Bush, he must be a good guy. That attitude lies behind the astonishing opinion polls in countries such as Germany, which show that people have more trust in xenophobic, authoritarian Russia than they do in the world’s most powerful democracy.

There is also a mistaken belief that Russia is an ally in the struggle against globalisation: here is a country, argue intellectuals such as the British historian Correlli Barnett, that does not let itself be pushed around by multinational companies and the meddling do-gooders of the self-appointed “international community”.

But this is to misunderstand Russia under its kleptocratic and chauvinist ex-KGB rulers. Russia likes multilateral organisations, so long as it dominates them. It runs a whole bunch: for example, the “Commonwealth of Independent States”, which it is using to legitimise its occupation of Georgia.

Russia is also advocating a new pan-European security organisation, with formal legal status. This, it hopes, will exclude the United States, and tie up the West in the knots of international law, so that military intervention of the kind seen in the former Yugoslavia becomes all but impossible.

Similarly, although the Kremlin makes life difficult domestically for Western oil companies and tightly restricts foreign investment in any industry that it dubs “strategic” (which potentially covers almost anything), it is another story abroad. Russia delights in the possibilities of the global economy. If regulators in New York are sniffy about listing stolen companies on the stock exchange, there is always London. And if you fail even London’s undemanding test, Dubai, Bombay and Shanghai await with open arms.

Russia also uses its colossal war chest, fuelled by oil and gas revenues, to buy up assets in other countries. And that is the taproot of European softness: money.

In the Cold War, doing business with the Soviet Union was a rare and suspicious activity. Now Russia has penetrated our markets and businesses to a huge degree. Energy companies such as Austria’s OMV, Germany’s E.ON and Italy’s ENI work hand-in-glove with outfits such as Gazprom, which is nominally Russia’s biggest company, but better described as the gas division of Kremlin, Inc.

This directly affects politics. Germany, with Russia, is building the Nord Stream gas pipeline along the Baltic seabed to bypass Poland. Russia has already cut off energy supplies to punish Lithuania, the Czech Republic and other countries. When Nord Stream is built, it will be able to do the same to Poland.
advertisement

Yet even now, after a clear and brutal demonstration of Russian imperialism, Germany refuses to consider cancelling the pipeline. Angela Merkel was willing to pay a high-profile visit to the Baltic states – a likely target for Russia’s next push westwards – to offer support. But she would not even contemplate ending her energy alliance with Russia.

And it is hard to see this changing: European consumers will not pay hugely higher energy prices to finance alternative supplies, nor will politicians give the EU the weight it needs to bargain properly with Russia (a country, don’t forget, that is three times smaller in population than the EU, with an economy roughly a tenth of the size).

With the EU and Nato hopelessly divided, Russia can dismiss our toothless whimpers about Georgia. That leaves Eastern Europe to base its security on the United States.

Yet even America’s willingness to confront Russia is limited. Every incoming president since Bill Clinton has criticised his predecessor for being soft on Russia. But none has proved any better. For all John McCain’s fighting talk, and Barack Obama’s belated belligerence, neither man will be able to take a hard line. America needs Russia – for nuclear security, to hold back Iran, to contain North Korea, as a supply route to Afghanistan, in hunting down terrorists. And Russia knows it. If the mood in Washington is frosty, the Kremlin need only flirt more intensively with Iran, Venezuela and China, or withhold co-operation on some pressing topic, and America will buckle.

On top of all that, Russia’s leaders have a massively secure position at home. Their central bank has nearly $600 billion in hard-currency reserves, while their popularity is far greater than the Politburo ever dreamed of. Mr Putin, and the war in Georgia, are acclaimed – a view stoked by the docile media, which portrayed the conflict as a valiant crusade against genocide and Georgian leader Mikheil Saakashvili as a murderous fascist.

Abroad, Russia senses that power in the world is shifting east and south, to countries such as India and China, which see Georgia very differently. They may not much like separatism, but they also think that the West is practising double standards: America would not tolerate the Kremlin’s meddling in its backyard, so why should Russia have to put up with an America protégé in the Caucasus?

The German philosopher GF Hegel wrote that the owl of Minerva spreads her wings only at dusk: we perceive historical changes only when they are almost complete. We have enjoyed an extraordinary 20-year period in which Russia was weak and seemingly benign. Europe became (mostly) whole and free.

The idea that the continent could again become a battleground between East and West is unwelcome, and to many still inconceivable. But it is happening: and our resurgent enemy seemingly holds most of the cards.

There is, however, one chink of light, for us if not for the Russians. In the long term, the Putin regime means catastrophe for his country. The political system is opaque and fossilised, unable to respond to the needs of a changing economy or to rein in corruption, let alone deal with the fast-growing Muslim population, which has soared to 25 million – a 40 per cent rise since 1989 – as the birthrate among the Slavs has plunged. Modernisation of public services and infrastructure, in a country awash with money, has been dismally slow.

Foreign adventures are the traditional way for autocratic rulers to distract public opinion from problems at home, and Russia is no exception. The regime running Russia will come unstuck in the end. But the cost in the meantime will be dreadful.

interview on Economist website

I am interviewed here on the Economist website audio podcast

BBC interview

You can hear me attacking a pro-Putin Tory MP on a BBC interview here (about 1 hour 6 minutes through the programme).

Daily Mail

[I am back from my holidays. And though I am much refreshed, I am both gloomy and furious. The piece that follows is just an opening salvo]



Like any bully, Russia can be faced down. Let's do it sooner rather than later

By Edward Lucas 28th August 2008

David Miliband is hardly the kind of man to set the hard nuts of the old KGB trembling.

The ruthless ex-spooks and spivs who run Russia believe that nothing can now stop their restoration of the old Soviet empire.

And the tragic, even terrifying truth is that they could well be right. Indeed, we are close to losing the new cold war before our politicians even admit that it has started.

By staging their brutal and audacious attack on Georgia at a time when most Western leaders were either on holiday or at the Olympic Games, Russia caught us napping.

And even when we did belatedly respond, we said nothing to bother them.

The message from the Kremlin comes cold and clear: if Russia is expelled from Western clubs, no matter.

With a massive U.S.$600billion in the bank, and politics firmly stitched up at home, Russia is ready to roll - and roll westwards.

In short, post-Soviet politics is now a triumph of mind over matter - they don't mind and we don't matter.

The past weeks have seen a stunning series of defeats for Britain and its allies. It is not just that Georgia, the only country in the vital Caucasus region that believes in our values, has been dismembered and humiliated. The map of Europe has been redrawn, and in darker colours.

Putinism - a mixture of Soviet nostalgia and nationalism - is now wildly popular in Russia. Hopes that the heady mix of liberty and justice that once toppled the Iron Curtain would take widespread root in the former Soviet empire have been dashed.

Worse, at any moment, on any pretext, Russia's so-called peace-keepers (cynics call them piece-keepers) can seize or destroy the vital oil and gas pipelines crossing Georgia.

These are our only escape from the Kremlin's stranglehold on energy supplies from the east.


Had it met a really tough response from the West, the Kremlin might possibly have pulled back in Georgia. Now it is pressing ahead. The next target is Ukraine, by far the biggest and most important of the ex-Soviet republics.

Ukraine is a free country with a lively media where nobody lives in fear of the midnight knock on the door, forcible incarceration in psychiatric hospitals or the arbitrary confiscation of property. Such things are the hallmarks of the ex-KGB regime in Russia.

But that does not mean Ukraine can defend itself. It is divided on ethnic lines, with a heavily Russified east that sees plenty to admire in Russia's resurgence, and finds the Western orientation of the country's quarrelsome and incompetent leadership mystifying and unappealing.

The most explosive mix is in Crimea, the balmy Black Sea peninsula, where Britain fought its last full-scale war with Russia.

Stalin deported Crimea's indigenous population of Tatars in 1944. They were replaced with settlers, who proudly hold Russian passports and detest their nominal Ukrainian rulers.

As it did in South Ossetia, Russia can all too easily say that it needs to intervene to protect their interests.

One of Russia's biggest naval bases, Sevastopol, is in Crimea. Ukraine wants Russia to pull out as agreed when the lease expires in 2017.

Russia shows no sign of wanting to leave a naval citadel that holds a place in Russian hearts, similar to that of Plymouth or Portsmouth in ours.

It is precisely this nationalist sentiment that the Kremlin has found so easy to manipulate. Russians feel they were badly treated by the West in the 1990s.

The billions we squandered in vain attempts to prop up the ramshackle Russian economy have long been forgotten. So, too, have our attempts to befriend them.

Russians complain bitterly that Nato expanded eastwards. But thank goodness it did. Georgia's fate is a warning of what happens to those countries that failed to get in.

It is in the Baltic that this geopolitical drama will reach its crux. Unlike Georgia and Ukraine, the Baltic states are unquestioned successes. The story of their recovery after a ruinous 50-year foreign occupation is inspirational.

Twenty years ago, I watched these three small, proud countries leap to freedom as the Soviet Union collapsed. Now I fear dreadfully that their independence will prove shortlived.

I fear for Estonia and Latvia, which have tens of thousands of Russian passport holders - a legacy of the cynical migration policies pursued by the Soviet Union.

Russia has been complaining for years about the language and citizenship policies of these two states, which it regards, preposterously, as racist.

In truth, the restrictions are mild - especially given that these countries have just emerged from decades of forced Russification.
stalin

Soviet shadow: The Georgian flag flies at half mast in downtown Gori, behind a statue of Soviet Union dictator Joseph Stalin

Public business must be conducted in the local language: those wanting to become citizens must learn it, and pass a simple history exam.

But the Russian propaganda machine is all too capable of whipping up an artificial scandal.

Lithuania, meanwhile, has only a small Russian minority but is vulnerable for a different reason: voters are exhausted and disillusioned with what they see as a corrupt and incompetent government.

The great danger is that they turn to populist pro-Russian politicians in elections in October.

But our politicians are no better. Blinkered, browbeaten, bribed or brainwashed - they seem, pitifully, ill-fitted to the challenge now facing them.

The callow and ignorant administration of George Bush has ripped up nuclear arms agreements with Russia, the world's second-largest nuclear power, without providing any alternative.

It failed to hold back the impetuous, adventurist Georgian leadership. But it is ridiculous to blame America. Europe's security is our business.

Let us not forget our own guilty men: Tony Blair snuggling up to Vladimir Putin for nights at the opera in St Petersburg, safely distant from the howls echoing from the torture chambers of Chechnya.

Nor our pinstriped fifth column: businessmen whose salivating pursuit of profits blinded them to the looming menace of Russia's authoritarian crony capitalism.

And let us also blame the European leaders in Germany, Italy, France and elsewhere, crass and craven by turns, who have divided the continent and endangered our security.

But we can still fight back. We should scrutinise the way in which Kremlin cronies use our banks to launder the billions they have stolen from the long-suffering people of Russia.
miliband

We can tighten our visa rules so that Ukrainians find a warmer welcome, and Russians a colder one.

We should remember that when we act together, we are far richer and more powerful than ill-governed Russia.

Europe's population is three times bigger, its economy ten times larger than that of its new foe.

We can protect what is left of Georgia by spending money to rebuild what the Russian forces and their freebooters have looted and destroyed.

And, most vitally, we can send Nato warships and soldiers to emphasise our support for the Baltic states, our loyal little allies now shivering on the front line.

Because for all the swinish swagger of the ex-KGB men as they toast their destruction of a country one-thirtieth their size, they have no appetite for a real confrontation.

Like any bully, Russia can be faced down. So let us do it sooner rather than later.

this from Economist website today

Russia and the West

Confrontational Russia
Aug 26th 2008
From Economist.com


Russia’s diplomatic recognition of two breakaway bits of Georgia is more bad news


TO GEORGIAN fury, Western consternation and strong support at home, Russia’s government recognised two breakaway regions of Georgia as independent countries on Tuesday August 26th. The map of Europe is different, and darker, as a result.

The planned dispatch of Russian diplomats to open embassies in Sukhumi and Tskhinvali, the main cities in Abkhazia and South Ossetia respectively, marks the formal dismemberment of Georgia: until very recently, Russia had at least in theory accepted its neighbour’s territorial integrity.

As long as Russia kept up its recognition of Georgian territorial integrity, it could claim that its soldiers in both places were peacekeepers operating under international mandates. Cynics, such as Georgia's president, Mikheil Saakashvili, had long joked that the Russian forces should be called “piece-keepers”, whose real role was to maintain the Kremlin's influence in the former empire. Russia says that its forces are protecting the Abkhaz and Ossetians from Georgian attack.

Diplomatic historians may find that the two new countries will not make for enduring study. The next act in the drama may well be that both new countries ask to become part of the Russian Federation. That underlines Russia’s dramatic military victory against Georgia in this month’s war, giving it a permanent presence south of the Caucasus mountains, close to the vital oil and gas pipelines that bring energy from the Caspian region and Central Asia to Turkey and beyond.

Russia likes to draw parallels with Kosovo—a state carved out of Serbia as a result of Western military intervention. But the parallel is superficial. Few embassies will open in South Ossetia (which, following the ethnic cleansing of its Georgian population, has a population little bigger than that of Liechtenstein). Close Russian allies such as Belarus and Tajikistan will be keen to put on a show of support. Others may be more chary of recognising Russian puppet states as independent countries. Moldova and Azerbaijan, for example, have headaches with similar entities, Transdniestria and Nagorno-Karabakh. Like South Ossetia and Abkhazia, they are the result of ethnic flare-ups in the dying days of the Soviet Union. Russian allies farther afield, such as Venezuela and Cuba, may be tempted to join in the humiliation of the West.

Hard words are flying. Britain and America have condemned the move. Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, called it “unacceptable”. She is on a hastily arranged visit to the Baltic states, which are now shivering in anticipation of what Russia’s foreign policy may hold in store for them. France, which holds the presidency of the European Union, had already called an emergency summit for September 1st to review ties with Russia. It was the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, who brokered a ceasefire on August 12th. He is furious with what he sees as Russian double-dealing.

Some of the strongest words came from Carl Bildt, the Swedish foreign minister: “That the Russian government leadership now has chosen this route means they have chosen a policy of confrontation, not only with the rest of Europe, but also with the international community in general,” he said.

All that may be true. But for now, criticism of the Kremlin’s actions in Georgia seems to be fuelling the Russian leadership’s determination to do more of the same. Public opinion seems strongly behind the muscular new foreign policy, seeing it as a sign that Russia has recovered from the weakness of the 1990s. Russia seems not to care that Western countries are now threatening to block its membership of the World Trade Organisation.

Indeed, Russia feels it can easily withstand Western displeasure. Soaring oil and gas prices have put nearly $600 billion in its hard-currency reserves. Many Russians reckon that in the end the big European countries that matter will decide that they care more about trade ties and reliable energy supplies than they do about Georgia. On the evidence so far, that assessment may be correct.

Georgia: my take from today's London "Times"

From The Times

August 9, 2008

How Georgia fell into its enemies' trap

The fighting in the Caucasus should be a deafening wake-up call to the West

Edward Lucas

When is a victory not a victory? When it dents your country's image, scares your allies and gets you into an unwinnable war with a hugely stronger opponent.

That is the bleak outlook for Georgia this weekend, after what initially looked like a quick military win against the separatist regime in South Ossetia. Georgia's attack followed weeks of escalating provocations, including hours of heavy shelling by the Russian-backed breakaway province and signs of large-scale Russian reinforcement.

Thanks to American military aid, Georgia's 18,000-strong armed forces are the best-trained and equipped fighting force in the Caucasus. But it is one thing for them to defeat the raggle-taggle militia of a tinpot place like South Ossetia (population 70,000). It is another for a country of less than five million people to take on Russia (population 142 million). Now the Kremlin is reacting strongly. Russian warplanes are reportedly striking targets in Georgia. Reinforcements are pouring in. And the Kremlin's mighty propaganda machine is lumbering into action while a cyber-attack appears to have crippled Georgia's websites.

For it is the information war, not what happens on the ground, that will determine the victor of this conflict. Russia is portraying Georgia as the aggressor, an intransigent and unpredictable country determined to restore its supremacy over an unwilling province by means of military force and “ethnic cleansing”. Such a country, clearly, would be unfit to receive Western support.

That seems to be working. European leaders have long been dubious about Mikhail Saakashvili, a charismatic US-educated lawyer who stormed to power in the Rose Revolution of 2005. Where the fans of the Georgian President see charm and brains, his critics - such as the German Chancellor Angela Merkel - see a dangerously headstrong and erratic leader. A crackdown on the Opposition in November, bullying of the media and instances of abuse of power among senior officials have allowed detractors to draw uncomfortable parallels between Georgia and Vladimir Putin's Russia.

These are misplaced: Georgia is not perfect, but it is not a dictatorship. Its leadership does not peddle a phoney ideology, such as the Kremlin's mishmash of Soviet nostalgia and tsarist-era chauvinism. It has a thriving civil society, vocal opposition and ardently wants to be in the EU and Nato. Moral grounds alone would be enough reason for supporting it against Russian aggression.

But on top of that is a vital Western interest. The biggest threat Russia poses to Europe is the Kremlin's monopoly on energy export routes to the West from the former Soviet Union. The one breach in that is the oil and gas pipeline that leads from energy-rich Azerbaijan to Turkey, across Georgia. If Georgia falls, Europe's hopes of energy independence from Russia fall too.

Yet the West is both divided and distracted. America will be furious if reports turn out to be true that Russian warplanes bombed an airfield where Pentagon military advisers are based. But a lame-duck president is not going to risk World War Three for Georgia. In Europe, Georgia's allies are mostly small ex-communist states such as Lithuania; heavily outnumbered by those such as Germany that prize their relations with Russia, seemingly, above all else. It seems Russia is ready to hit back hard, in the hope of squashing the West's pestilential protégé.

In short, it looks more and more as though Georgia has fallen in to its enemies' trap. The script went like this: first mount unbearable provocations, then wait for a response, and finally reply with overwhelming military force and diplomatic humiliation. The idea that Georgia sought this war is nonsense. Recovering control of South Ossetia from its Russian-backed rulers has been a top priority for the Georgian authorities for years. But nobody thought it would come by military means. The Georgian strategy had been to use soft power, underlining its prosperity and the corruption-

busting successes of Mr Saakashvili's rule. That contrasted sharply with the isolation and cronyism of South Ossetia, which survives only on smuggling and Russian subsidies.

Now that strategy is in ruins. As things stand, Georgia will be fighting not to regain South Ossetia or even to deter aggression, but to survive. It is hard to see any good outcome. Georgia has failed to win a quick victory: crucially, it failed to block the Roki tunnel under the Caucasus mountains, normally used as a smugglers' highway, but now the route for Russian heavy weapons that Georgia cannot counter for long. Worse, the authorities in Abkhazia, Georgia's other breakaway region, may mount an attack, either on its own or with Russian help.

The fighting should be a deafening wake-up call to the West. Our fatal mistake was made at the Nato summit in Bucharest in April, when Georgia's attempt to get a clear path to membership of the alliance was rebuffed. Mr Saakashvili warned us then that Russia would take advantage of any display of Western weakness or indecision. And it has.

Edward Lucas is the author of The New Cold War (Bloomsbury)

War in Georgia

he Caucasus

Bang bang, who’s dead?
Aug 7th 2008
From The Economist print edition


Sabre-rattling continues in a dangerous corner of Europe


IF IT is not the prelude to a real war, it risks being mistaken for one—and in a corner of Europe where Western and Russian interests could clash nastily. The talk of war has been in the air for months. But in the past two weeks six people have been killed in the breakaway (and Russian-backed) region of South Ossetia.

Claim and counterclaim abound. Russia says that Georgia fired first and is reinforcing its forces as a prelude to war. It sent warplanes into Georgian airspace last month—to deter an attack, it said. It also blames Georgian warplanes for violating South Ossetian airspace. Georgia says this is disinformation: Russia and its South Ossetian allies “are trying to create an alternative reality”, says a spokesman. Georgia has brought foreign ambassadors to inspect its lightly armed guard posts which, it insists, fire only in self-defence. This is by no means the first skirmish in the region. Georgian and South Ossetian politicians wrangled about a possible meeting on August 7th aimed at calming the mood.

But the row has given Russia a chance to step up pressure on Georgia, portrayed in the Russian media as a tiresome and aggressive Western stooge. The South Ossetian leader, Eduard Kokoity, said that he would force Georgian forces out of his self-declared republic (which is a patchwork of villages and small towns, some controlled by Georgian authorities and others by separatists). He says 300 Russian irregulars have come to his aid.

The quarrel in South Ossetia follows an escalation of tension in the other breakaway region of Georgia, Abkhazia. Russia has reinforced its military presence there, which is nominally part of a UN-monitored peacekeeping effort. A German-drafted peace plan for the economic revival of Abkhazia, indefinite autonomy and the return of Georgian refugees has so far stalled. The Abkhaz authorities are uneasy about the Russian embrace, but fear the return of ethnic Georgian refugees, once the largest ethnic group in the region.

The Kremlin’s immediate aim seems to be to force Georgia to return to the Joint Control Commission in South Ossetia. This body comprises Georgia, Russia, South Ossetia and the Russian republic of North Ossetia, just across the border, with the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), a Vienna-based multilateral body, as an observer. Georgia thinks that this is intolerably unbalanced and has walked out.

Russia also wants Georgia to give a formal guarantee that it will not use force in either breakaway region. Georgia thinks that unless its refugees can return this would amount to de facto recognition of the secessionists. It wants a stronger OSCE presence, demilitarisation, and international (not Russian) peacekeepers. It also wants joint Georgian-Russian control of the Roki tunnel under the Caucasus mountains. This, Georgia says, is used both for smuggling and for illegal reinforcements to South Ossetia.

Russia’s broader aim may be to try to roll back the advance of pro-Western forces in its “near abroad” by highlighting the West’s inability to help Georgia. The hotting up of Georgia’s conflicts coincided with Kosovo’s declaration of independence, recognised by much of the West, and American pressure for the expansion of NATO to Georgia and Ukraine.

That move has been stymied, mainly by Germany; Georgia was promised eventual NATO membership but no firm plan. Though Georgia has become a vital corridor for oil and gas exports to Europe, this has not brought the support that its leaders had expected. A lame-duck American administration has been able to do little, though Georgians hope a presidential-election victory by John McCain, an ardent supporter, may change their fortunes. The country’s strong-willed and idiosyncratic president, Mikheil Saakashvili, is not seen by all European leaders as quite the paragon of legality, freedom and reform that he claims to be. Georgia’s image was severely dented in November last year by a crackdown against the opposition.

Georgia is in a quandary: its Western friends tell it to stay calm yet seem unable to stop Russian bullying. It is all too easy to imagine misjudgements on either side leading to a real war. Georgian officials will spend August nervously at their desks. Some of their European counterparts may have other plans. As the recipients of an often daily blizzard of alarms and appeals from Georgia, they think that a summer break might be just the ticket.

From the new Standpoint magazine

---

Putin's New Evil Empire

EDWARD LUCAS

Few things make the bien pensants more uneasy than talk of right and wrong. They flinched when Ronald Reagan called the Soviet bloc, rightly, the “evil empire”. Sometimes that fastidiousness was simply based on wilful ignorance. Reports of Stalin’s terror, the Gulag, persecution of dissidents or the bullying of the captive nations were dismissed as tendentious or inaccurate. More often it was based on a feeling that the West’s own shortcomings were so appalling that we were in no position to judge anyone else. Amid the ruins of communism in Czechoslovakia in late 1989, I sat through an excruciating dinner with my then foreign editor where I explained that the Czechs wanted to become a “normal country”. He couldn’t share my enthusiasm. “What’s ‘normal’ about Britain?”, he asked scornfully — a country where mounted police charged striking miners, where a quarter of the population lived in poverty, and where you could be locked up for a decade just for having an Irish surname.

Yet the Czechs were right, and my distinguished boss, whose liberal conscience was tingling so painfully with the shortcomings of Mrs Thatcher’s Britain, was wrong. Their enthusiasm for welfare capitalism and political freedom was based not on a naive belief that everything we had was wonderful, but a realistic appreciation: when things went wrong in communist countries, you were powerless. In Western countries, you had a chance, either through politics, the law, or the media, to get something done about it.

I was reminded of this at another dinner last February in London, where a frail but determined Baroness Thatcher enjoyed a lengthy standing ovation from hundreds of Lithuanians gathered to celebrate the 90th anniversary of their country’s founding. The Lithuanian ambassador to London, Vygaudas Usackas, with a moral clarity and historical perspective that are seldom found in our own diplomatic service, explained eloquently how Mrs Thatcher’s tough talking had given hope to him and three million other Lithuanians, a captive nation in the Soviet empire. The Iron Lady beat the Iron Curtain. She may be the object of easy derision on the London stage and at the dinner table, but to those who tasted totalitarian rule, she is still a heroine.


If the political elite in the West found it hard to grasp that the old Cold War was a struggle of good against evil, they find it almost impossible to understand the moral dimension of what is going on now, particularly with regard to Russia. Readers will need little to remind them of that country’s descent into autocracy at home and bullying abroad. The events—it would be unfair on countries with real political freedom to call them “elections” — of December and March produced a sycophantic legislature and a docile successor, Dmitri Medvedev, in the Kremlin. But it is clear that real power will stay with the man — and the system — that has ruled in Russia for the past nine years.

Vladimir Putin has moved from being president to prime minister. He is also chairman—I nearly wrote General Secretary—of the ruling party. Together with his ex-KGB colleagues, he presents a profound challenge to the West, and never more so than now. Our economy is slumping just as theirs is booming. The idea that economic prosperity depends on political freedom seems to have been exploded. Russia has a system of authoritarian bureaucratic capitalism that at least on the surface seems to deliver the goods: high living standards, decisive leadership, and none of the messy complications of Western-style electoral democracy and separation of powers.

Even when the real shortcomings of the Kremlin’s crony capitalist system are pointed out, we in the West flinch from telling it like it is. So Russia’s economy and politics are distorted, monopolistic and corrupt? Surely that’s just like Italy — particularly with Mr Putin’s chum Silvio Berlusconi back in charge. So Russia incarcerates dissidents in psychiatric hospitals? Well, America has flung the innocent into the prison camps of Guantánamo Bay.

It is certainly true that the worst aspects of the Russian system are often a concentrated form of our own worst shortcomings. Indeed, the West has largely lost the moral authority that it enjoyed during the last Cold War. Once it was the Russian elite who feared us, and ordinary Russians who admired us. Now the elite despises us for our corruption and weakness, and ordinary Russians see little difference between one lot of rulers and another.

But just because we have many flaws does not mean that we are always wrong, or that somewhere else can’t be worse. Without some kind of moral self-confidence in our own system, we cannot defend it: we are in the same position as the kind of leftwingers who believe that mugging is a political action by the poor against the rich. The squirming reaction to the praise lavished by Nicolas Sarkozy on Britain’s dynamism, efficient institutions and deep historical traditions was a good example. His audience were so used to moaning about Britain’s crowded, vulgar, discredited (fill in blanks from either The Guardian or Daily Mail leader columns according to your choice) that they could hardly believe that a foreigner was coming here to tell us that we had something to be proud of.

Moral timidity is a gift to Kremlin propagandists. During the Cold War they were trained to use a technique that I dubbed “what-about-ism”. Any criticism of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, martial law in Poland, political persecutions or censorship was met with a “what about” apartheid South Africa, (or trade union rights, American-supported dictatorships in Latin America, etc, etc).

Now they have a much easier job. Communism was a hard sell. Not only did it demand huge sacrifices of freedom, but it didn’t work. The painful truth for the Kremlin’s lie-mongers was that workers in the Soviet Union lived worse — a lot worse — than their counterparts in America. The crony capitalism of modern Russia is much less distinctive. And — lethally for us — it is highly tempting for the rich, powerful and unscrupulous elsewhere. That is particularly true now that the regime has taken some of its most sinister ex-KGB types out of the front line, and promoted the quiet, lawyerly Mr Medvedev. On close scrutiny, his well-honed phrases about liberty and the rule of law sit ill with the lawlessness and repression at home. But they are a perfect sugary coating for the bitter pill that the Kremlin wishes us to swallow: the Finlandisation of western Europe, and the recovery of its old eastern Empire.

The clearest example of this has been the Kremlin’s success in suborning Germany, once a pillar of the Atlantic Alliance and now almost Russia’s closest ally in Europe. During the old Cold War it would have been inconceivable that a serving German chancellor, in his last weeks in office, would have signed off a loan guarantee on a controversial Kremlin-backed energy project that directly threatened Europe’s collective security. It would have been even less conceivable that, having left office, the same German politician would then take a lucrative job as chairman of that project.

Yet that is exactly what Gerhard Schröder, the successor to such giant statesmen as Konrad Adenauer and Willy Brandt, did in 2005, with the Nord Stream pipeline. This will take gas along the Baltic seabed directly from Russia to Germany, bypassing the countries in between (and thus making them vulnerable to energy blackmail). Even more shocking is that the German government of Angela Merkel has been unable to derail the project.

Worse, at the Nato summit in Bucharest in early April, it was Germany that blocked the chances of Ukraine and Georgia taking the next step towards Nato membership. Never before had the divisions in Nato been so cruelly — and dangerously — exposed. A compromise was cobbled together to disguise the split; but the damage had been done. When push comes to shove, Germany cares more about pleasing Russia than America. Now Georgia is paying the price, as Russia moves swiftly to annex, in effect, the breakaway provinces of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. These two statelets have been Russian puppet states for 15 years. The pro-Western government in Georgia is humiliated; those in it who have argued for a peaceful approach to the separatists are undermined. And as the Kremlin flexes its muscles, the absence of any protest from Europe is painfully apparent.

That exemplifies one of the most successful tactics adopted by Vladimir Putin and his ex-spook sidekicks. He has successfully built up the Kremlin’s influence not only on the West, but also in the West. The growing business lobby tied to Russia represents a powerful fifth column of a kind unseen during the last Cold War. Once it was communist trade unions that undermined the West at the Kremlin’s behest. Now it is pro-Kremlin bankers and politicians who betray their countries for thirty silver roubles.

Nobody in Britain has any reason to get on a moral high horse where Germany is concerned, given the behaviour of our own commercial and financial elite. If someone turned up in the City of London with a suitcase full of Fabergé eggs purloined from a Russian museum, it is hardly likely that the slickest investment bankers, sharpest lawyers and smoothest PR firms would compete for the business of selling them in a legal and uncontroversial way. (At least I hope not.) But when Russians turn up with a stolen oil company, such as Rosneft, the story is quite different. Having gobbled up the eviscerated remains of Yukos, a company largely owned by Western shareholders, Rosneft came to London and successfully listed its shares, with barely an eyelid batted among the pinstriped accessories to the deal.

That sort of behaviour makes it much harder to draw a line between the law-governed liberty of the West and the lawless greed of Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Why bash Russia when Germany is just as bad? The West is open to criticism that it uses double standards; even that it is racist. Why are we so hard on the behaviour of countries that dare to be assertive in their foreign policy (i.e. Russia) while overlooking those that play the Western game (i.e. Italy)?

It is that question which is now the central “ideological front” of the new Cold War. Does the West really believe in its own values? Do its rulers feel any sense of shame? And do voters mind? The broad path downwards is tempting. We will become more like Russia. Our rulers dip their snouts in the trough, paying lip service to conflict-of-interest rules, soaking up expenses and bribes while in office, and looking forward to lucrative directorships afterwards. Voters regard politics as a mildly entertaining soap opera, but lose any sense that it makes a difference to their daily lives. Public-spiritedness becomes a mugs’ game. Voting is something you do with your wallet and your feet. If politicians muck us about too badly, we stop paying taxes or move abroad. As public services fray, we go private. The rule of law remains, at least in theory — a ghostly reminder of a nobler age.

That is the broad path down, but a narrow and rugged way back to moral ascendancy is there, if we choose to tread it.

It requires first of all a clear understanding of the historical and geographical context in which we articulate our views. Stalinism, for example, should not be regarded as some distant abstraction, as irrelevant to modern-day politics as the Bismarckian militarism of 19th century Prussia. It is a powerful and toxic force that modern Russia has yet to confront. The fact that Vladimir Putin regards the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact as lawful is not some curious historical footnote. It is as outrageous as if a German chancellor were to maintain that the Munich agreement on the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia had been “just another treaty”. Our ahistorical, optimistic age finds that difficult to grasp. Politicians with a strong sense of history are rare. “That was then, this is now” is an easy retort to those who raise the whiskery problems of the past.

A degree of historical amnesia is a necessary lubricant in politics. The postwar rapprochements between France and Germany, or more recently between Britain and Ireland, would not have been possible if either side had stuck rigidly to a script featuring past historical wrongs. But that presupposes goodwill. Germany and Poland get on pretty well — but it took Willy Brandt’s genuflection in Warsaw in 1970 to dent the Polish conviction that nothing could be forgotten or forgiven. Nobody should rub modern-day Russians’ noses in the Katyn massacre, or the mass deportations from the Baltic states to Siberia of 1941 and 1949. But the quid pro quo is that Russians do not speak of those years with pride or nostalgia.

Secondly, we have to be a lot blunter about what we are doing and why we are doing it. Why do we accept the language and citizenship policies in Estonia and Latvia, which the Kremlin portrays, now with increasing vehemence, as a discriminatory blot on the West’s record? Why do we think Kosovo deserved to be independent, while Transdniester (a breakaway region of Moldova) doesn’t? Is it solely because the Kosovan leadership is pro-American and the separatists in Transdniester are Lenin-loving Soviet holdovers? If so, it is hardly surprising that Russians and others think we are being hypocritical.

The answers to these questions are good ones, but too often understated. Estonia and Latvia have certainly inflicted some injustice on the Soviet-era migrants stranded on their territory when the empire collapsed. They must pass a language test if they want to become citizens of the reborn countries. That policy was unsettling, upsetting, and to some extent unjust; and this needs to be bluntly acknowledged. But it would have been an even greater injustice to have expected those much abused countries to give instant citizenship to a population still largely loyal to the old Soviet order, or to have allowed the russification policies of the past decades to become a new status quo. An honest Western policy would say this — and also point out that the Russians living in the Baltic states now enjoy far more political freedom and much higher living standards than their compatriots in the Motherland. Russia does not like that to be said, which is one reason why nobody says it. But it is still true. Our policy was tricky, but both right in principle and successful in practice. Such things deserve to be advertised, not mumbled.

Similarly with Kosovo: the truth is that we think that Europe’s “soft imperialism” gives us a chance of making a go of it. It is not just the thousands of lawyers and police — the continent’s most ambitious colonial adventure for decades — that the European Union is sending to give the new-born state a semblance of law-governed rule. It is also that Kosovo (and Serbia) have reservations on that clunky, puffing rattletrap of the enlargement train. EU expansion rarely gets the plaudits it deserves. It is easier to highlight the bad side-effects: unsettling migration, growing criminality, bad government and corruption. But overall it has been a stunning success, spreading freedom and security to tens of millions of people. For all its faults, Europe has a great deal to be proud of in the way it treats its citizens — nowhere else in the world do so many people enjoy such liberty or such good public services. And it is all the more commendable that this sphere of good-ish government is spreading east.

By contrast, Russia has nothing except cheap gas to offer tinpot statelets like Transdniestria. However muddled, ineffective and hypo­critical the EU is in its influence on what it calls the “European Neighbourhood”, it is incomparably better than the thuggishness and mischief-making that are the hallmark of Kremlin policy in its former empire. We do not want Transdniester to become independent, because it will be like Russia. We do want Kosovo to be independent, because it will eventually be like us. Again, that is a blunt message, but one better spoken proudly than left unsaid.

Historical perspective and plain speaking are only part of the story. Real success will come only when we strengthen our own moral ­authority. That requires the West to become both more self-critical and more self-confident. On the face of it, that is a conundrum. In fact, it is the extent and effectiveness of self-criticism that distinguishes us from the authoritarian societies to the east. And it is on this that our self-confidence should rest. That is a task not just for politicians, but for everyone. Our cause — and our future — are corroded by bad government, apathetic citizens, sloppy journalists and, most of all, those who scoff at the very notion of right and wrong. If we do not use it, we will lose it.

Copyright © Social Affairs Unit Magazines Limited 2008

---

Source URL: http://standpointmag.co.uk/putins-new-evil-empire

Leader from this week's Economist

Georgia and Russia

Gather round the gorge

May 15th 2008
From The Economist print edition

The outside world can help deter both Russian bullying and Georgian vote-rigging

IF YOU have not heard of the Kodori Gorge, you may soon. A Georgian-controlled sliver of territory in the breakaway enclave of Abkhazia, it looks nastily like the flashpoint for a new hot war in the Caucasus. Russia, which protects the Abkhaz regime, insists that Georgia is planning to use Kodori to attack Abkhazia. That is unlikely. Georgia's modern but small army is no match for the Russian behemoth. Steep terrain with only one tiny road divides Kodori from the rest of Abkhazia. And starting a war would ruin Georgia's hopes of joining NATO.

A more plausible explanation of Russia's propaganda offensive and increase in the numbers of both regular and irregular forces in Abkhazia is not fear of a Georgian attack, but plans for the opposite: an attempt to retake the Kodori Gorge. This would humiliate, perhaps topple, Georgia's pro-Western president, Mikheil Saakashvili. Russia would see it as giving a firm response to the deplorable precedent of Western recognition of Kosovo's independence. If you use your muscle to separate Kosovo from Serbia, the Kremlin would grunt, then just watch what we can do to a would-be ally of yours.

Tensions are still growing ahead of Georgia's parliamentary elections on May 21st. A war would splinter Georgia's fragile democracy, destabilise the whole Caucasus and embolden Russian hawks to cause bother elsewhere. That is trouble worth avoiding.

If Russia's new president, Dmitry Medvedev (see article), wants to be taken seriously as more than a puppet of his predecessor, Vladimir Putin, he could start by cooling the row with Georgia. Menacing the country mocks his talk of the rule of law. Others can also help. Some European Union countries are joining Lithuania's hitherto lonely protests on Georgia's behalf. This week five foreign ministers went to Georgia to bemoan Russia's knout-rattling. A mission of foreign military and political observers to the Kodori Gorge itself would be a useful follow-up. It would give the lie to Russia's claims that Georgia is preparing for war. And it could deter Russia from an attack. Killing Georgian soldiers is one thing for Russia; killing officials from EU and NATO countries is another.

Georgia should change too

Meanwhile Georgia could help itself by bolstering its democratic credentials. The heavy-handed dispersal of street protests in November and allegations of ballot-rigging in January's presidential election have sullied its reputation. That helped NATO's summit in April decide that putting Georgia on a clear track to membership was premature.

Georgia's friends might rally more enthusiastically behind it if the parliamentary elections were not just clean, but seen to be beyond reproach. Mr Saakashvili's supporters say that the opposition is intransigent and maybe even outright treacherous. Bits of it may well be. But that is no excuse for dodgy election practices.

It is sadly too late to settle some controversies, such as the composition of the election commission. But video recordings of the numbers entering polling booths should be comprehensive and freely available to help allay suspicions of ballot-stuffing. Complaints need to be followed up seriously. Otherwise the impression given is one of arrogance at best, and at worst a willingness to conceal dirty deeds. Outside monitors should offer to look into any complaints that the Georgian authorities fail to investigate properly.

Demonstratively coupling its prosperity with freedom and legality will win Georgia moral high ground, and wider backing, in its war of words with Russia. And it might one day even help win back Abkhazia too.