Russia: Lighting a ‘powder keg’ in the Caucasus

last updated 8 January 2015

Georgia used to be at the heart of the Russian empire, said Elke Windisch in Germany’s Stuttgarter Zeitung. Stalin himself was Georgian. Yet ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the two states have been at each other’s throats. The main bone of contention is the regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, which broke away from Georgia in the early ’90s. In a highly provocative move, then–President Vladimir Putin recently offered them trade links and consular ties—a clear sign he supports their independence (or absorption into Russia). Georgia’s Western-backed president, Mikheil Saakashvili, has pleaded for NATO intervention, warning that Russia has been building up troops in Abkhazia and accusing Moscow of shooting down an unmanned reconnaissance drone from a former Soviet airbase inside Abkhazia. Promoting the creation of mini-states in the Caucasus, a region of extraordinary ethnic complexity, is reckless in the extreme, said Canada’s Globe and Mail in an editorial. It’s tantamount to “lighting a powder keg” in the region.

Well, let’s call it payback for Kosovo, said Russia’s Vedomosti. We begged the West not to recognize Kosovo’s independence from Serbia, but to no avail; it can hardly now complain about other regions with separatist ambitions going their own way. And the West continues to be needlessly provocative: President Bush pushed for Georgia and Ukraine to join NATO. Again, the West can’t complain if Russia then threatens to point nuclear weapons at Ukraine should it even think of doing so.

In the end it was Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel, out of deference to Putin, who scotched Georgia’s and Ukraine’s NATO dreams, said Fred Hiatt in The Washington Post. She thereby gave Putin the green light to make a move against Georgia, knowing the West would not interfere. Mark my words, such a move is the first step toward annexation of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, said Mart Laar, a former prime minister of Estonia, in Russia’s Moscow Times. The Kremlin hard-liners had been pushing Putin to get the ball rolling while he was still president, and Putin exploited the distraction caused by the U.S. presidential election campaign to do just that. The West must shake off its “torpor” and come to Georgia’s defense. As Winston Churchill once said: “The belief that security can be obtained by throwing a small state to the wolves is a fatal delusion.”