Two years on from conflict in Georgia, Russia seeks to win the peace.

President Medvedev talks to President Bagapsh in Sukhumi.

Two years ago this weekend Georgian shells started to rain down on South Ossetia’s capital, Tskhinvali.  The robust military action which Russia took to defend the contested breakaway republic is still a matter of controversy.

However, the European Union’s fact-finding report confirmed, unequivocally, that acts of aggression from Georgia marked the beginning of the conflict.  The document bolstered the case for governments in the US and EU to reconsider their reflexive backing for President Saakashvili.

The regime in Tbilisi continues to show, periodically, an authoritarian bent, and its behaviour is still erratic.  Saakashvili’s military gamble, which briefly threatened to push the US into direct confrontation with Russia, now looks like a massive miscalculation.



Dmitry Medvedev marked the war’s anniversary by visiting Abkhazia, the other Black Sea region whose unilateral declaration was accepted by the Kremlin, in the wake of conflict.  Recognition comes at a price and the investment programmes which the Russian President unveiled are dependent on economic reforms, which will integrate the two tiny republics’ economies with Russia’s.

Moscow argues that harmonisation and the free movement of goods are necessary, if South Ossetia and Abkhazia are to prove viable entities.  In Tskhinvali, where there is support for a united Ossetia within the Russian Federation, that proposition is uncontroversial.  In the Abkhazian capital, Sukhumi, there is a more independent spirit and Russia’s mentorship is viewed as a necessity, rather than an end in itself.

Certainly, for the region’s stability, and for the citizens of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, the republics’ economic rehabilitation is a necessity.  Before the war the most likely solution to the problem of these breakaway areas was an acceptance of autonomy by Georgia.  Having tasted recognition, albeit limited, of their statehood, that is unlikely to satisfy the governments in Sukhumi or Tskhinvali any longer.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Football fever in Russia

Russia Blog is getting excited about Euro 2008. Indeed it is drawing parallels between Guus Hiddink and Peter the Great in terms of successful Russo-Dutch exchanges of expertise. Meanwhile, in Moscow, fans have been taking to the streets in order to celebrate the national team’s achievements.
Read more

Stormont might not collapse but paramilitaries continue to disfigure Northern Ireland

Image
The devolved institutions in Northern Ireland are supposedly ‘teetering on the brink’ of collapse yet again.  After repeated failures to agree a balanced budget or implement welfare reform created months of uncertainty, the Executive’s future is now in doubt because the PSNI believes members of the IRA were involved in murdering a republican hit man.  Despite its apparent seriousness, this particular predicament is unlikely to bring the shaky edifice at Stormont crashing down. The IRA was supposed to have disbanded its military ‘structures’ and decommissioned its entire arsenal of weapons back in 2005.  It was on the basis of this understanding that power-sharing resumed in 2007 and the DUP entered government with Sinn Féin.  From the outset it was a fairly flimsy pretext.   Less than a year after John de Chastelain, the retired Canadian general, oversaw decommissioning, the Independent Monitoring Commission reported that the IRA retaine...
Read more

Walker loada rubbish

Former BBC employee Brian Walker has overrun Slugger O’Toole lately with countless poorly structured, poorly written posts. It is possible quickly to recognize and avoid these by subjecting each Slugger piece to a cursory inspection and identifying those which feature characteristic lack of paragraphing and a tenuous grasp on the technicalities of linking source articles. Although I generally evade Walker’s posts by this method, occasionally (and unfortunately) I have persevered and found that their content is as unrewarding as the style in which they are written. Today, for instance, I inflicted upon myself Brian’s thoughts on a mooted Fianna Fail / SDLP merger . In actual fact, he is right to welcome news that the Southern Irish party has dropped this proposal from its agenda; however, the logic by which he arrives at this conclusion is parochial nonsense. To summarise, Walker believes that pursuing realignment with larger parties, whether they are from the rest of the UK or fro...
Read more