Stratfor.com
\nAugust 27, 2007<\/p>\n
Russian President Dmitri Medvedev on Tuesday
\nrecognized the independence of two regions in the
\nterritory of the former Soviet republic of
\nGeorgia: Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Russia and
\nGeorgia fought a brief war over the territories
\nearlier this month which Russia clearly won. Now
\nRussia will undoubtedly enter into \u201cformal\u201d
\nnegotiations with the two \u201cstates\u201d about either
\nlong-term military staging agreements or formal annexation.<\/p>\n
The West, which has consistently backed the idea
\nof Georgia\u2019s territorial integrity, broadly
\ncondemned the move, but has taken no action
\nbeyond rhetoric. Nor is it likely to in the short
\nterm. The West could deploy naval forces that can
\noutmaneuver and box in Russia as a whole, but
\nthat requires time and political will. In the
\nmeantime, Russia has forces on the ground in the
\ntwo territories and loads more nearby. The West
\ndoesn\u2019t. The Russians clearly are the ones
\ndetermining the reality on the ground, and that \u00ad for now \u00ad is that.<\/p>\n
But recognition is not something that seems to
\nserve Russia\u2019s interest. Unlike the drama
\nsurrounding the independence declaration of
\nKosovo earlier this year, there is no broad
\nswathe of states standing by to recognize Abkhaz
\nor South Ossetian independence. Only Belarus \u00ad
\nwhose leadership is finding its leash
\never-shorter \u00ad is likely to jump at the news, and
\neven then not until the appropriate recognition
\nspeech is faxed to them from the Kremlin.
\nAdditionally, Russia is packed to the gills with
\nits own separatist regions and Tuesday\u2019s decision
\nwill only give all of these disparate and
\nresentful groups food for thought. If Abkhazia
\ncan be independent, why not Chechnya? If South Ossetia, why not Tatarstan?<\/p>\n
So why open Pandora\u2019s Box?<\/p>\n
First and foremost, the recognition decision is
\nabout Kosovo. In Kosovo, the West utterly ignored
\nRussian concerns and imposed a legal regime that
\nfit with Western interests. With Abkhazia and
\nSouth Ossetia, Russia is returning the favor in its own backyard.<\/p>\n
Yet for that logic to hold, this must be only the
\nbeginning. For the Russians the war and this
\nrecognition is not really about Abkhazia and
\nSouth Ossetia, or even about Georgia. It is about
\nredefining the expectations of a broad swathe of
\nactors all along the Russian periphery. Since
\n1992 many entities have been eating away at the
\nRussian borderlands \u00ad the West first and foremost
\namong them. In Moscow\u2019s view, Russia needs to
\nroll that tide back not just in the Caucasus, but
\nin Central Asia, the Baltics, Ukraine, and maybe even the Balkans.<\/p>\n
But that does not mean that tide will be rolled
\nback in a day. Russia holds most of the cards,
\nyet does not appear set to press its advantage,
\nor at least not immediately or overtly. There are
\nany number of things the Russians could do in
\nAzerbaijan, Ukraine, the Baltic states \u00ad or even
\nin Georgia \u00ad that they have chosen to put on hold
\nfor now. Tuesday\u2019s recognition had a feel similar
\nto that of the press statements of the Western
\npowers: rhetoric that danced around the real issue.<\/p>\n
The reason for the (brief) break in the action is
\nlikely rooted in Russia\u2019s mindset, which in turn
\nis determined by Russia\u2019s geography. Russia\u2019s
\nborderlands are for the most part indefensible
\nand so the Russian psyche has been shaped by wave
\nafter wave of foreign invasion. A certain
\nparanoia about outsiders is understandable.<\/p>\n
But there is another layer. Built into this fear
\nof outsiders is a belief that Russia\u2019s suffering
\nhas allowed others to escape Russia\u2019s dark fate
\nand thrive. For example, Russians feel that while
\nRussia languished under Mongol subjugation, their
\nresistance prevented the Mongols from conquering
\nEurope. Another common belief is that the Soviet
\nUnion\u2019s battles with Nazi Germany gave the United
\nStates and United Kingdom the time they needed to
\ninvade France. These national myths \u00ad which is
\nnot to say that they are fabrications, merely
\ninterpretations – blend Russia\u2019s natural paranoia
\nwith the idea that the rest of the world owes
\nthem something. Therefore, it is just a matter of
\nfinding the right words to convince the world of that \u201cfact.\u201d<\/p>\n
In the aftermath of the Georgian war we suspect
\nRussia is waiting for what they feel would
\nconstitute an \u201cappropriate\u201d response from the
\nWest. We suspect that the Russians expect to be
\ninformed that the West will recognize Moscow\u2019s
\nsuzerainty in Russia\u2019s sphere of influence and
\nsee no reason to push the matter so long as the
\nbalance of forces are so obviously in Moscow\u2019s favor.<\/p>\n
For better or worse, this buys everyone a bit of
\ntime. Time to negotiate a West-Russia truce
\nperhaps. Or perhaps time for the two sides to
\ngear up for a much larger \u00ad and broader \u00ad conflict.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Stratfor.com August 27, 2007 Russian President Dmitri Medvedev on Tuesday recognized the independence of two regions in the territory of the former Soviet republic of Georgia: Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Russia and Georgia fought a brief war over the territories earlier this month which Russia clearly won. Now Russia will undoubtedly enter into \u201cformal\u201d negotiations […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":83,"featured_media":179175,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[209,42],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3117","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-georgia-caucasus","category-russia"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3117","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/83"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3117"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3117\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/179175"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3117"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3117"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3117"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}