A year ago this Friday Russia and Georgia went to war. By the standards of modern warfare it was a little war. It lasted five days. Casualties were modest. It nevertheless sparked the greatest European security crisis since Slobodan Milosevic unleashed the dogs of ethnic cleansing in the Balkans in the 1990s. Moscow invaded a neighbour for the first time since the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. It broke the cardinal rule of post-cold war European security that borders in Europe should never be changed by force of arms. It showed an ugly neo-imperial side of its policy that many in the west had hoped was part of the past.
The origins of this war were not rooted in competition over territory or the status of the separatist provinces of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. This war was fought to prevent Georgia from going west; and these conflicts were hijacked as part of a broader strategy to undercut Tbilisi’s western aspirations. Moscow feared the impact that Georgia’s pro-western democratic experiment could, if successful, have in the southern Caucasus and potentially across the border in Russia.
Pointing to the Kremlin’s motives does not absolve Georgia of responsibility for its mistakes.
President Mikheil Saakashvilli’s decision to fight last August 7 was a desperate response to the imminent threat of the ethnic cleansing of tens of thousands of Georgian citizens in South Ossetia, the loss once and for all of the separatist province as well as a possible assault on Tbilisi – along with his fear that he would not survive politically if he did nothing. He began a war his key allies had repeatedly warned him not to start and that he could not win. It is easier to start than to stop a war – as Tbilisi discovered when it was forced to accept an unjust peace to survive.
The west, too, should look in the mirror. Its disunity and policy mistakes accelerated the path to war. For years it supported a flawed peacekeeping arrangement that Moscow manipulated to go to war. Kosovo’s independence enhanced Georgia’s vulnerability without a plan for mitigating such fallout. And Nato’s handling of the Ukraine and Georgia issues at the spring 2008 Bucharest summit provided Moscow with the trigger for its campaign of escalation. The real mistake was not getting more involved on the ground in Georgia and with Moscow at a time when conflict could still have been prevented. We failed to back the core principles and norms of a European security order ostensibly designed to protect small states from the predatory behaviour of large ones. That system, too, failed last August.
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