Everyone Loses: The Ukraine Crisis and the Ruinous Contest for Post-Soviet Eurasia

Prevailing interpretations of the conflict – either Saakashvili fell into an elaborate Russian trap or he launched a murderous Reconquista war with a tacit green light from Washington – are equally fallacious. Both assume premeditation and planning that the facts do not corroborate. It does look as if the Georgian government had been gearing up for a war, but earlier in the summer, and in Abkhazia, not South Ossetia.[44] In the hours leading up to the decision to attack, the Georgian leadership seemed to have come to believe that a Russian invasion was in motion.[45] Russia may well have been trying to provoke Saakashvili, and it was certainly employing heavy-handed deterrence, particularly with its large military exercise that ended in early August.[46] But on 7 August, Russia had only minimal forces present near the Roki Tunnel leading from Russia to South Ossetia. Medvedev was on a cruise on the Volga; Putin, now prime minister, was at the Beijing Olympic Games; and the defence minister was on vacation on the Black Sea coast. In short, both sides were preparing for a war, but neither was planning for the war that actually happened.

The war itself should thus be seen as a classic security dilemma, in which escalation spirals spark conflict despite a lack of aggressive intent. That said, tensions between Russia and Georgia had grown that spring and summer in part because of the zero-sum approach of some Western countries, particularly the US under the Bush administration. With the exception of Germany’s foreign minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, no visible effort was made at preventative diplomacy involving Moscow. Indeed, the Bucharest misadventure did not cause Washington to give up the push for MAP; after the summit, and even after the war, it still pressed its reluctant allies on this point.[47] The Bush administration concluded that ‘Russia interpreted the denial of MAP as a green light for action against Georgia’.[48] On that twisted logic, granting MAP would have been a deterrent to future bellicosity. With much of Georgia still smouldering, the idea that now was the time for NATO to antagonise Russia once again found few adherents in Brussels.

Moscow, for its part, could not resist coercing Tbilisi in the run-up to the August war. While it doubtless had to respond to the attack on Tskhinvali, in the event its response was disproportionate and punitive. Not only did the Russian military devastate the Georgian armed forces’ capabilities, but it and its South Ossetian confederates expelled more than 25,000 ethnic Georgians from South Ossetia. It might have gained primacy over 20% of Georgia’s territory, but it lost the hearts and minds of the rest of the country. By recognising Abkhazia and South Ossetia, Moscow may have avenged the West’s move in Kosovo, but it created a range of problems for itself. Russia seemed to have taken the opportunity to implement several objectives once the shooting began, particularly ruling out MAP and NATO membership. In this sense, Georgia suffered more from the Russia–West tug of war than it would have under other circumstances. As Dmitri Trenin of the Carnegie Moscow Center writes, ‘For Moscow, the war was not about Georgia as much as about the United States, with Georgia no more than a proxy.’[49]

In the wake of the Georgia war, the West came to view Russia in far more adversarial terms. The US response included cutting off all contact between Pentagon officials and the Russian military; pushing for the suspension of the NATO–Russia relationship; and pulling a civil nuclear agreement from Congress. We now know that a far more drastic response was considered at the highest levels of the Bush administration during the war itself. The president, vice president and other senior officials held a meeting to consider the possibility of using military force to prevent Russia from continuing its military assault on Georgia. Bombardment of the Roki Tunnel that Russian troops used to move into South Ossetia and other ‘surgical strikes’ were among the options discussed. Upon consideration, the group ruled out any military response.[50] In an interview 18 months later, a Cheney aide said he remained unsure ‘whether or not [use of force] should have been more seriously considered’. He went on: ‘If Russia continues to assert itself either militarily or through other coercive means to claim a sphere of influence, we will look back at this as a time that they were able to change boundaries in Europe without much reaction. And then we’ll say we should have considered harder options.’[51] The US, it was implied, should have gone to war with Russia to rebuff its assertive actions in the region. Without question, the messy equilibrium regarding the regional order that had emerged following the Soviet collapse had been upset.

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