Georgia As a Testing Ground of Putin's International Conduct

by Vladimir Socor, IASPS Senior Fellow

(Paper presented at the Annual Session of the America-Georgia Business Council, Tbilisi)

This presentation seeks to bring the necessary perspective to the recent escalation of Russian pressures on Georgia. The Pankisi problem, for all its urgency and its explosive potential, is an almost incidental complication to a far broader, deeper set of chronic problems. Now that the Georgian authorities are bringing the situation in Pankisi under control, it is time for Georgia's Western friends to refocus political attention on those larger, festering problems.

Since taking over as president of Russia, Mr. Vladimir Putin has successfully streamlined and centralized the decision-making processes, particularly in foreign and security policies. This president has also put an end to unauthorized initiatives by various governmental departments in the "near abroad," and has installed his trusted personal associates in the top posts. Mr. Putin, moreover, has established Kremlin control over the Duma. The pressures on Georgia, which earlier had often been imputed to various Russian agencies acting purportedly on their own, became more systematic and more dangerous under Mr. Putin's presidency than they had been during Boris Yeltsin's final years. President Putin intensified the pressures on Georgia well before the Pankisi problem came up. His own statements left little doubt that bringing Georgia to heel was one of his personal projects from the outset of his presidency.

Pankisi is a problem in its own right, requiring and receiving its solution in Georgia by Georgians, in ways that stabilize the situation, instead of blowing it up in the gorge and on the Russia-Georgia border. When the United States launched the Train-and-Equip Program in Georgia, Mr. Putin chose--as he had in Central Asia--not to stand in the way. Since then, however, he and his close lieutenants have stepped up the threats to intervene militarily in Georgia, under antiterrorism pretenses, without Georgian and international consent.

Moscow's recent fixation on Pankisi has served to distract international attention from its other actions that aim to keep Georgia weak, unstable and thus vulnerable to resubjugation. This paper will identify six main features of Moscow's policy toward Georgia.

1. Reneging on earlier commitments regarding base closures and troop withdrawal.

Russia's military presence in Georgia lacks a legal basis and contravenes Georgia's oft-expressed will. The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe at its 1999 summit required Russia to close down the Gudauta base by July 2001, and to negotiate with Georgia regarding the Batumi and Akhalkalaki bases. All of the OSCE member countries including Russia subscribed to those summit decisions, shortly before Mr. Putin became president of Russia. Mr. Putin, however, signaled his intention to repudiate those obligations shortly after he came to power.

Russia retains the Gudauta base to this day, more than a year after the deadline for its closure. Part of the garrison and some heavy weaponry has been withdrawn from Gudauta to Russia; but no one really knows what weaponry went, how much heavy weaponry remains in place, and what arms may have been handed to the Abkhaz by the remaining garrison. The Russian side has blocked OSCE inspections at Gudauta, although the Treaty on Conventional Forces in Europe stipulates that such inspections are obligatory.

On the Batumi and Akhalkalaki bases, Moscow now demands an absurdly long 11 year-term for closure, as well as an agreement on the bases' operation during that period. This in effect would mean an 11-year extension with a seeming legalization of the bases, and the risk of an open-ended presence. Meanwhile, Russia has unilaterally suspended the OSCE-mandated negotiations with Georgia.

On the other hand, Moscow has said that it wants Western countries to defray at least part of the costs of relocating the troops from Georgia to Russia. Georgia's Western friends should give this idea urgent favorable consideration, so as to initiate the troop withdrawal process without any further delays. Western countries were right to help build accomodation in Russia for some of the troops that withdrew from Germany and the Baltic states during the 1990s. Subsdizing the withdrawal of Russian troops from Georgia would, a) cost far less, compared to those earlier cases which involved much larger Russian forces, and b) help secure Georgia's independence and Western orientation, the strategic and economic payoff of which is of course worth infinitely more than the cost of relocating those troops to Russia. Such Western subsidizing should be firmly linked to clear deadlines for the departure of troops and the closure of bases.

2. Sponsorship of armed ethnic secession and rogue statelets.

In Abkhazia, a political and humanitarian problem of mass ethnic cleansing stands, unresolved and practically unaddressed, before the international community. The refugee problem is a heavy economic burden and a political fuse waiting to be lit up. Russian military intervention had created these problems in the first place. It also created the Abkhaz military forces.

When Mr. Putin singled out Georgia for abolishing visa-free travel arrangements, he preserved those arrangements for residents of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, thereby not only discriminating among citizens of Georgia, but drawing those two secessionist areas closer to Russia. Most recently, Russia has been handing out its citizenship to Abkhaza's and South Ossetia's residents. South Ossetia's new top leader is a citizen of the Russian Federation, long-time resident in St. Petersburg. Another St. Petersburg Chekist, perhaps ? The Abkhaz leaders have all along held Russian citizenship, and some of them hold ranks in the Russian military or security agencies, just like their colleagues who rule the Transnistria region of Moldova.

Meanwhile, the Russian Duma's Kremlin-controlled majority has passed legislation that, on paper at least, authorizes the Russian Federation to "admit" other states or parts of other states into the Russian Federation as its constituent units. And in another recent development, Russian ministerial delegations on visits to Abkhazia discuss inter alia the possible acquisition of what is legally Georgian state property by Russian entities.

In light of all this, it is high time for Western policy makers to ask Mr. Putin whether, in his view, international law still applies to Russia-Georgia relations.

3. Appropriation of "peacekeeping."

In Abkhazia and South Ossetia--as in Moldova's Transnistria region--Russia seeks acceptance of an exclusive role as military "peacekeeper" in post-Soviet areas. In parallel, it insists on a leading role as diplomatic mediator in the local conflicts that it had itself sparked and continues to exploit. Fortunately, Russia has not obtained any official recognition of that special role, though it enjoys a certain degree of acceptance de facto. Any formalized acceptance, or prolonged tacit tolerance by the West, would constitute a significant element in the creation of regional spheres of Russian influence rooted in the Soviet past.

Russian "peacekeeping" in Abkhazia and South Ossetia--like that in Moldova's Transnistria---does not meet any of the internationally accepted standards for peacekeeping operations. The Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), which lends its name to Russia's "peacekeeping" in Abkhazia, has no legal authority to issue or prolong peacekeeping mandates. Although the need to internationalize this operation is generally recognized, Western countries have acted half-heartedly on this matter, and have been thwarted by Mr. Putin's diplomats. At present, as NATO looks for new missions--indeed for nothing less than new raisons d'être--peacekeeping and conflict resolution on Europe's doorstep are an obvious part of the answer.

4. Disdain for international organizations.

Last year and this, OSCE observers reported a number of air raids carried out by Russian planes in Georgia. Yet Russian officials denied the obvious facts even after the OSCE had reported them. The situation at Gudauta (see above) also shows Moscow's disdain of the OSCE.

In April of this year, Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov falsely claimed that Georgia, the United Nations Observer Mission in Georgia (UNOMIG) and U.N. special envoy Dieter Boden had, each and all of them, authorized the Russian troops' incursion into Georgia's Kodori Gorge. Mr. Ivanov's claim, utterly implausible to begin with, was conclusively and irrefutably laid to rest by Ambassador Boden, other U.N. officials, and by Tbilisi. That Russian incursion came within a hair's breadth of provoking a battle with Georgian forces. Sergei Ivanov, author of that deception and initiator of the raid, is known to be Mr. Putin's closest confidant.

This month, the European Court of Human Rights expressed concern over Russian demands to Georgia to extradite eight Chechens without proper legal procedures. In response, Mr. Dmitry Rogozin publicly admonished the European Court of Human Rights to "stop bothering Russia." Mr. Rogozin was speaking in his triple capacity as the Duma's foreign affairs committee chairman, trusted ally of President Putin, and top Russian representative to the Council of Europe, with which the European Court of Human Rights is affiliated.

5. An instrumental approach to the issue of international terrorism.

Shamil Basaev, Ruslan Gelaev, and hundreds of Chechen fighters were armed, trained and deployed by the Russian military in the Abkhaz war against Georgia. They were not classified as "terrorists" by Moscow when they served as its proxies.

Later, Igor Giorgadze, the suspected organizer of the 1995 assassination attempt against President Shevardnadze, was extricated to Moscow. That was one of several attempts on the president that were traced to Russian territory and supportive structures there. Mr. Giorgadze is wanted ever since for legal proceedings in Georgia. To this day, Russian media including Kremlin-controlled state television recurrently carry interviews with Mr. Giorgadze, even as Russia's intelligence agencies--Mr. Putin's home base--claim to be unaware of Igor Giorgadze's whereabouts. The post-September 11 international political consensus on the issue of terrorism has not impinged on Mr. Giorgadze's safe haven. On the contrary, he has received added visibility in the Russian media's latest anti-Georgian campaign.

6. "Dezinformatsiya" through mass media.

Russia's media have, under Mr. Putin, lost much of the freedom they had enjoyed previously. The Kremlin and its political allies now control or influence much of the media output. Officially-inspired coverage of Georgia and of Russia-Georgia relations is an exercise in misinformation. It is designed to excuse the Russian military's setbacks in the Chechnya war, back up the threats of force against Georgia, generate anti-Georgian sentiment among the Russian public, mislead international opinion, and prepare the political atmosphere for possible military actions on Georgian territory.

The presidential chief spokesman Sergei Yastrzhembsky, other members of the Putin team, and occasionally Mr. Putin himself set the tone of this campaign. Intelligence services are conducting it and have enlisted the major media in it. All this would be unimaginable in democratic countries, including post-communist Eastern Europe. Such misuse of the media in Russia illustrates the truism that neo-imperial ambitions are destructive of democracy at home.

The six features, identified above, add up to a coherent mode of conduct. Its various components have been in evidence at various times during the post-Soviet period in several areas of the "near abroad." In Georgia, however, all of these components have been in evidence, consistently over time, and supplemented recently by threats of military intervention. Moscow has, to all intents and purposes, suspended the operation of international law in Russia-Georgia relations. It is American steadfastness that has shielded Georgia from the worst.

Major Western interests are at stake in Georgia regarding the transport of Caspian oil and gas and the commercial access of Western Europe to Central Asia. Those Western interests are jeopardized by a Russian policy that threatens and destabilizes Georgia.

For all these reasons, Georgia should be regarded as a touchstone of Mr. Putin's willingness to accept the post-Soviet countries' independence and their choice of a Western orientation. Georgia is also the place where the Kremlin can show whether it supports U.S.-led antiterrorism efforts as a matter of principle, or as part of tradeoffs in which it seeks a free hand in this country. In sum, Georgia is a testing ground of Mr. Putin's international conduct.

The present moment is a hopeful one for Georgia. Construction work on the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline has just started, and will hopefully start on the Shah Deniz-Tbilisi-Erzurum gas pipeline soon. The U.S. Train-and-Equip program is now on track, and should enable Georgian forces to provide for internal security. These are the best things that happened in Georgia since independence, and are the signs of a new historic era for the South Caucasus as a whole. Consistent Western engagement will ensure that Georgia's independence and development are not reversed by forces of the past.

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