Many experts consider the events of September 11, 2001 as the starting point of a new geopolitical situation. Would it be justified to equate the role and significance that the events of August 8, 2008 had for the history of the territory of the former Soviet Union to that of September 11? Does the South Ossetia tragedy provide grounds for such comparisons?

The global catharsis promulgated by the international mass media after the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York cannot be viewed with the same system of coordinates as the bloodstains, pain and libel that flooded the global information medium in the tragic days of August 2008. It is true that the post-Soviet world has become different, but its image does not have any clear contours yet. The picture is blurred, fragmented and has been torn apart into elements prefabricated in different editing rooms. Everyone is free to compile them into their own mosaics.

THEATER OF OPERATIONS: THE CAUCASUS

Everything seen in the battle for South Ossetia was just one phase in the complicated continuous transformation of the territory of the former Soviet Union – the process of an unwavering break from the “common past” and fashioning a new reality where former relationships and the declared “multi-vector policies” have given way to a policy of tough contentions marked by inevitable transient coalitions and situational unions of “making friendships against someone.”

Multi-vector diplomacy, a principle that member-nations of the CIS have been declaring for years, is not a universal remedy. A new phase of polarization is taking hold in international relations as norms of the past are rapidly losing their topicality, while the elaboration of the new rules of the game is impeded by the difference of approaches and capabilities of major players and regional leaders.

All the parties involved in the South Ossetia conflict are paying for past transgressions. The drama has brought into the spotlight all the dubious products of the “civilized divorce” between former Soviet republics in the early 1990s that left a huge number of unsettled problems pertaining to the so-called ‘unrecognized states.’ Russian diplomacy is partly to blame for this because its inertia and half-baked steps have created a situation where the South Caucasus has remained a zone of instability over all of the seventeen years since the breakup of the Soviet Union.

Russia has traditionally played the role of a moderator in relations between the peoples of the South Caucasus. This was not always a well-balanced policy, but ruptures in the system of Russia’s influence in the region show that an armed free-for-all is the most probable alternative to Russia’s withdrawal from the region, and the series of conflicts that erupted at the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s provides the best proof of this. Political scientists in Tbilisi and Baku wonder if a foreign force – like NATO, the EU or the U.S. – can get a tight grip on the Caucasus and block unfavorable trends if Russia pulls out of the region. This remains an intriguing and open question.

Simultaneously, the non-use of real intermediary mechanisms – as opposed to the virtual ones typical of the early years of Boris Yeltsin’s presidency – brought to a halt the aspirations of Russian diplomacy (if it really had them) to keep the status of a “supreme arbiter.”

It cannot be ruled out that Russian political leaders did not believe at the time that the newly independent states could survive much longer than the Kremlin had anticipated or that the “younger brothers” could soon start claiming the role of equal partners. But the biggest miscalculation of the early 1990s consisted in the misunderstanding of an obvious fact that the geostrategic region uniting the Caspian littoral area and the South Caucasus was moving center stage in the realm of Russia’s economic and political interests and taking on the role of a centerpiece in the struggle to optimize energy resource transportation routes.

Inconsistent actions on the part of Russian diplomats in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, and later in a series of other conflicts, produced a situation where Russia became just one of the equals trying to appease the warring sides.

Although efforts by international negotiators cannot be called successful either, it is a different thing that really matters; namely, that the sides involved in regional conflicts stopped perceiving Moscow as the only force capable of administrating the Caucasus. By placing the golden calf for the chosen few above other geopolitical reasons, Russian political leaders accomplished with their own hands a thing that the British Empire had failed to do in the middle of the 19th century. As a result, powers located far outside the Caucasus and their regional allies got the opportunity to conduct policies that opposed Russia’s national interests. Apart from the South Caucasus, this line of conduct also aimed to squeeze Moscow out of Central Asia and the area around the Caspian Sea.

The instruments of direct impact that Russia still has in the South Caucasus are confined to a military-political partnership with Armenia and the presence of Russian peacekeepers (whose status is likely to change now) in Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Yet, formerly too, when the two unrecognized states existed with most of the population having Russian citizenship, the same half-baked policy of the formal recognition of Georgia’s territorial integrity was conducted, although in reality the choice was between two options – the recognition of these states’ independence or their incorporation into the Russian Federation. As the creeping integration of those territories with Russia was evident before August 2008, Russia’s ‘peacekeeping’ role acquired a dubious hue.

Leading Russian politicians did acknowledge the extreme risks inherent in the use of force and thus they used tactics to freeze the conflict and waited for their opponents to make mistakes – and later, for mistakes by Mikheil Saakashvili, the impulsive Georgian president. The problem is that lying in wait creates over-dependence on situational glitches and sporadic actions. It also gives the impression of a lack of any clear strategy or clear understanding of the final objectives of Russian policy in the region.

It would make a lot of sense for Russian politicians to heed a recommendation by Sergei Karaganov, who said: “We can’t lull ourselves with a relatively bloodless disintegration of the Soviet Union. We are in the middle of this disintegration, and the process can play up any time. The current unrecognized states must get extremely pragmatic treatment, and if reunification is impossible, then we must work toward their recognition as states and vest them with full responsibility. Nobody said that the Soviet Union would necessarily break up into only fifteen countries. There may be seventeen or even more countries in the end.”

Karaganov made these remarks shortly before the international community recognized Kosovo and his words have proven to be prophetic. The Kosovo precedent has added fuel to the situation around the unrecognized states in the territory of the former Soviet Union, while the pull/push policy ended in a heating up of the “frozen conflict.”

SURROUNDED BY SMOKE

There will be prominent blank spots in the history of the so-called Five-Day War for some time, and the real winner will emerge only in the long term when the active phase of this confrontation winds up. The real struggle always begins once the war is over.

Wars are won by those who accomplish their objectives and in spite of the defeat in the global media, Russia achieved its immediate goal – it firmly resolved for itself the right to act as a provider of security and to help develop Abkhazia and South Ossetia.

One can insist on full-fledged sovereignty for the two former autonomies; can label their status as ‘protectorates’; or can provide other vague definitions, but the mist surrounding the future patron of the two territories has disappeared. The coercive postwar de facto partitioning of Abkhazia and South Ossetia from Georgia creates new contours for the Georgian border. The two territories will develop as part of the Caucasus regions of the Russian Federation, and Tbilisi is unable to do anything about it. Russia has come to stay regardless of whether the outside world recognizes the current forms of its presence there or not.

Moscow fought the tiger when it refrained from making even feeble attempts to formalize the status of the two republics through international procedures. This involved huge risks, but Russia has put all the priorities in place and has started moving along a new path. Support for Russia’s initiatives to recognize Abkhazia and South Ossetia was initiated virtually right in the offing.

The Kremlin believes, however, that the game is worth the risk, since it is not only the future of the two regions or Georgia that is at stake. The question is whether Moscow has the right to full-scale engagement in formulating the rules of the game that will replace the rules that have disastrously fallen apart in recent years. The territory of the former Soviet Union is the centerpiece of this standoff.

STATES INDEPENDENT OF THE COMMONWEALTH

What consequences could the conflict around South Ossetia have for the Commonwealth of Independent States?

In the first place, it clearly exposes the crisis of the CIS and, in a broader sense, of most integration structures throughout the former Soviet Union. The problem is not limited to Georgia’s decision to withdraw from the CIS or to anti-Russian maneuvers by Ukrainian political leaders. CIS leaders did not rush to reconcile the conflicting parties and distanced themselves from uttering any clear assessments of the events in South Ossetia. The principles of efficient relations between CIS countries, so loudly declared previously, gathered dust on the shelf this time, as post-Soviet state helmsmen took a non-interference stance during the first few days of the conflict, then replaced this stance with verbal joggling and formal bows to Russia.

Russia’s closest allies did not show any willingness to go back on the principles of multi-vector policies and to support Moscow. Moreover, Kyrgyzstan, Belarus and, to a lesser extent, Kazakhstan issued very dim standardized statements during the active phase of the conflict. Officials from the Collective Security Treaty Organization came up with the first statement several days after the outbreak of hostilities in South Ossetia, announced by Nikolai Bordyuzha, the organization’s general secretary. The Kremlin’s partners in integration projects put their reactions on hold, citing insufficient information and realizing that this conflict would not likely have a winner if one took its purely political aspects. And if so, why should they bear the strategically unpromising burden of giving their unequivocal support to Russia? CIS leaders did not play any role in putting out the active phase of the conflict and, in all appearances, did not have any burning desire to join the ‘peacekeeping’ efforts either.

Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev offered a clear-cut vision of the CIS prospects. “The Commonwealth doesn’t have the levers or mechanisms for interfering in conflicts like South Ossetia,” Nazarbayev said. “When something happens, people start asking why CIS countries keep silent. The principle of any state’s territorial integrity is recognized by the world community. All the member-nations of the CIS speak against separatism, and such complicated inter-ethnic problems should be settled peacefully through negotiations. There is no military solution to them,” he said.

It is worth noting that alternative integration projects – above all GUAM (Georgia, Ukraine, Azerbaijan and Moldova) – were inept in their actions, although GUAM countries – especially Azerbaijan and Moldova – face serious separatist problems of their own.

A great deal of attention was paid to the reaction of Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev, since the Nagorno-Karabakh factor might have prompted Baku to take a better-articulated stance, even though it might have contradicted Russia’s actions. And yet the Azerbaijani government kept silent for ten days. Aliyev broke his silence on August 20, saying after talks with Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Recep Erdogan that both Russia and Georgia are Azerbaijan’s friends and he would like to see friendly relations between those two countries as well.

Aliyev’s vague position is probably the most reasonable, if not the only possible, approach. In spite of his clearly pro-Western course, he has never triggered open confrontation with Moscow. Understandably enough, Baku is doing this to preserve an opportunity to revert to a normal rhythm of relations with neighbors as restive as Russia and Georgia. And this return is inevitable, since wars finally do end, even in the Caucasus. Maneuvering between Russia and the West looks like the optimal policy for the Azerbaijani leadership on the eve of a presidential election at home.

Georgia’s actions have sharply increased the risks for major energy projects in the Caucasus, and the risks will only grow if the conflict drags on. At this point the losses suffered by the Azerbaijani government and foreign companies that invest in the exploration and production of hydrocarbon deposits stand at several hundred million U.S. dollars. Experts with the Caspian Energy Alliance believe that Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Azerbaijan will need time – as well as considerable political and economic efforts – to move along with the talks on a trans-Caspian export system after the situation stabilizes in the Russian-Georgian conflict zone. Increased economic and political risks are bound to affect the Azerbaijani economy, which relies heavily on Georgia for oil and gas transits across Georgian territory. Kazakhstan, with its questionable ability to reorient itself to the Chinese market quickly, will be affected as well.

The South Ossetia conflict produced a highly-mixed reaction in Moldova and in the breakaway Dniester region.

Dniester-based experts – and a number of analysts in Moscow as well – started predicting that the Kremlin would surrender this unrecognized republic. Their reasoning suggested that Moscow would thus demonstrate an encouraging potential embedded in the format of a peaceful solution to conflicts surrounding breakaway republics.

At the same time, Moldovan President Vladimir Voronin came to the opposite conclusion and made a number of tough statements in late August. His statements contradicted his former policy of appeasing the Kremlin. A compromise between the central and Dniester governments is hard to achieve for reasons entirely different from the situation in the South Caucasus. Influential political leaders in both Moldova and in the Dniester region have radically different business plans and that is why the Russian leaders will have either to conduct a prolonged ‘dialogue enforcement’ policy or cut the knot by recognizing Dniester’s independence. The latter is barely conceivable, as it will provoke sharp opposition from Ukraine and yet another confrontation would be too risky for Moscow.
Kazakh political scientist Dosym Satpayev summed up the reaction of Russia’s partners by saying: “Kazakhstan must be strong enough in the new conditions of geopolitical turbulence in order to prevent the brawlers from stampeding it, and it also must be flexible enough to make their contradictions instrumental.”

This forecast was confirmed at a recent summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. Kazakhstan’s Nursultan Nazarbayev, who condemned the use of force by Mikheil Saakashvili, said: “We think all the steps taken by Russia were subsequently aimed at defending the residents of the much-suffering city (Tskhinvali). Russia could either ignore the bloodshed or stop it.” This is the best that Moscow could hope for.

One can whine about the absence of “reliable partners” – and that is something the Russian mass media are doing – only after it becomes clear what the forms of real partnership are in the new conditions of an interdependent world and diversified foreign policy risks.

Is the world really watching a crisis of the Westphalian system, i.e., a transition from a model based on sovereign states with their own territory and legal status to a new system, the parameters of which are not known yet? Whatever the situation is, there are clear-cut limits to admissible support. One can try and reconcile Russian President Dmitry Medvedev with words and simultaneously refrain from being one of the first countries to recognize an independent South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

If relations between Russia and the U.S. deteriorate further, if the theoretic possibility of sanctions against Russia materializes; and if tensions between Russia and the West in general continue to rise, the multi-vector diplomacy course espoused by most post-Soviet leaders will run into serious problems. Playing on the contradictions between major players is possible only when all the participants in the game follow the same code of rules. Any aggravation inevitably leads to chaos and to dropping clear principles of interaction, and this may deal a blow to Tashkent, Baku and Astana that have grown unaccustomed to force majeure situations.

Regional powers stand to gain nothing from the further polarization and escalation of tensions, and the presidents of both Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan will certainly not be pleased with an anticipated post-conflict strengthening of China’s positions in Central Asia, as the ‘Chinese vector’ is lucrative for them only in the same set with the Russian and Western vectors.

The situation concerning Russia and Ukraine is no less complicated. One could expect that the leaders in Kyiv would promulgate a strongly pro-Georgian position, especially considering the special relationship between Victor Yushchenko and Mikheil Saakashvili, but the Ukrainian president did not confine himself to symbolic statements of support for Tbilisi. He exerted immediate pressure on Russia by using the situation around the Russian Black Sea Fleet. The Ukrainian Foreign Ministry issued a terse statement at the beginning of the conflict saying that Kyiv could prevent the return of Russian naval ships to the Fleet’s main base in Sevastopol, and a bill was submitted to Ukrainian parliament to revoke a Ukrainian-Russian agreement on the status and terms of the Fleet’s deployment in Ukraine. Then Yushchenko sent an urgent proposal to the Russian government to draft a bilateral agreement on the use of Russian Black Sea Fleet units deployed in Ukraine that would help settle problems of the kind “we saw in early August.”

For Yushchenko, the August 8 events became an extra argument in favor of Ukraine joining NATO project, but the deep split inside the Ukrainian government does not make it possible to draw far-reaching conclusions about the political aftermath of the August crisis for future Ukrainian-Russian relations. Yulia Tymoshenko’s cautious stance is especially illustrative in this respect – she tried to stay away from making any assessments of the situation in Georgia. Quite possibly, silence is golden for Ukrainian politicians now that a presidential election looms on the horizon, while the alignment of forces remains obscure.

Georgia’s withdrawal from the CIS should prompt Russia to weld the ranks of its allies and to sign more binding cooperation agreements in the format of the Collective Security Treaty Organization and the Eurasian Economic Community (EurAsEC). It also sent a strong signal about the importance of reforming integration agencies and stepping up their activity. The CIS has played the role of a universal floor for negotiations in the last few years where, for example, Vladimir Putin could have meetings with Saakashvili, and the presidents of Armenia and Azerbaijan could have talks as well.
Georgia’s withdrawal has reduced the number of countries whose goals sharply contradict Moscow’s interests and, consequently, has increased the chances that the CIS will turn into a pragmatic and efficient organization. It has not been ruled out that the Georgian demarche will finally bring it home to Russian political leaders that Russia needs the CIS and that the destiny of the organization depends to no small degree on cohesion in its ranks, and this realization will naturally have an impact on the prospects for the CIS.

On the other hand, Russian expert Alexander Karavayev points out that “the crisis in Russian-Georgian relations will give rise to highly confused thoughts in CIS member-states about how to build relations with Russia in the future.” Moscow has so far been unable to present a development strategy for the territory of the former Soviet Union. Instead, the Kremlin is mapping out a kind of corridor of pendulum swings for the partners and is installing red flags; and if one steps outside these flags, there will be conflicts – first of all in the energy and security sectors.

WILL EUROPE HELP US?

Zbigniew Brzezinski said in a speech at the European Media Forum in April 2008 that the current surge in tensions between Russia and the West cannot be called a new Cold War as it lacks a crucial element – an ideological confrontation between the superpowers. However, U.S. President George W. Bush amended the words of the U.S. policy guru after the events in Tskhinvali. “The Cold War is over. The days of satellite states and spheres of influence are behind us,” Bush said. This was a reminder for Russia that the era of the Soviet Empire is behind us and civilized countries do not behave like this.

And yet, it would be an overstatement to claim that ideology has vanished from post-Soviet geopolitics. Could anyone really claim that the differences in the definitions of Georgia do not rely on ideologies? Russia calls Georgia an American satellite prepared to break any norms of civilized behavior, while the U.S. describes it as a “courageously successful democracy.” Propaganda forms ideological junctions for further assessments. U.S. television only portrayed the situation from the Georgian point of view during the conflict. The U.S. administration’s ideological stance is that America supports democracies in the CIS, but when a democracy evolves into something directly opposite (and Georgia’s internal policy is full of such instances), then the White House continues supporting it as a springboard for its own advance into the region – naturally behind the guise of “democratic” ideology. Washington’s logic stipulates that Russian authoritarianism is unacceptable for the world, while Georgian (and generally any pro-Western) authoritarianism is acceptable since it represents just a situational deviation linked to ethnic mentality and separatist conflict.

The U.S. is using the events in Georgia to put pressure on Russia everywhere – in the South Caucasus, Ukraine, and Central Asia. There have been calls to set up a broad anti-Russian coalition. The idea was voiced hotheadedly by David Miliband, Britain’s Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, and was immediately supported by the “new Europeans.” A day later, however, Miliband said isolating Moscow would be counterproductive.

Recognizing the independence of Abkhazia and South Ossetia produced an upsurge of indignation and panicky predictions ranging to the possibility of a new world war (with French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner saying especially remarkable things on this). And what is the probability of the rise of a united anti-Russian front?

The conflict in South Ossetia has left European nations with an uneasy choice – to show their solidarity with Tbilisi and Washington and to shut their eyes to obvious encroachments on human rights by Georgia, or to take a more positive stance and treat the events without any bias. The Old Continent has once again split into unconditional supporters of the U.S. and a more moderate camp. Although this rhetoric can heat up, Europe has not defined its position yet, and Russia needs to incessantly cultivate the tendencies lucrative for itself.

Moscow needs to maintain a solid foundation of public support in EU countries. The Soviet Union had its ‘fifth column’ in the West even at the height of the Cold War. That column consisted of writers, scientists and public figures who were friendly toward the Soviet Union either out of Communist convictions, or because the Soviet Union did not accept the rules of the game of the Western consumerist society. And where are all those ‘friendship associations’ and pillars of support now? Is there anyone capable of sincerely promoting a positive image of the new Russia without additional Gazprom investment?

THE BOTTOM LINE

To sum up, Russia has emerged as the implicit winner from the first round of the confrontation. Georgia has made a final decision to abandon the CIS. Mikheil Saakashvili seems to have received a mandate of support for another twelve to eighteen months. Last but not least, relations between Russia and the West have sunk to new lows and, quite possibly, this is the main result of the conflict. Former Soviet countries leaning toward the West have the right to lay claims now to an umbrella that will protect them from the new ‘evil empire.’

Along with this, there is hardly any doubt that August 8 dealt a severe blow to all the political and security structures in Europe. A statement on the importance of elaborating a new system of European security that Dmitry Medvedev made in Berlin in June 2008 has thus found a bizarre confirmation.

A mounting struggle for resources, a drifting toward a new line of divisions and, consequently, toward a new Cold War, albeit one taking account of the rules of global co-habitation, have brought sizable changes to the territory of the former Soviet Union in their wake. This territory has completely lost its former contours and has turned into a field for an open struggle involving major players. As interstate relations slide into total chaos and there are no clear rules of conduct, CIS leaders – Russia’s opponents and its allies alike – are building their political course based on a realization that the resources they can count on in this situation are limited.

The events of August 8 have reaffirmed the limitations of the post-Soviet multi-vector policies as a universal recipe of survival in this new, but far from perfect world. A question about the strategy that Russia should follow in this situation probably has just one answer that can be found in Dante Alighieri: “Follow your own path, and let people talk.” It looks like all other options are gone and what remains to be done is to choose that path.