South Ossetia War 2008

Apparently doing politics and knowing some Russian qualifies me to throw in my 2 kopeks (which is quite a bit less than 2 cents), so here goes. The German foreign minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said that (and I paraphrase) it is ‘unclear which side is the aggressor in this conflict’. Now he knows perfectly well that that’s a complete and utter load of bullfrogs (though he’s a properly lefty socialist so it’s possible he actually believes this stuff) – Georgia invaded South Ossetia, which, as every blogger from here to Svalbard has pointed out, including of course the ever-excellent Devil’s Kitchen, is as yet legally part of Georgia, because the local rebels were getting on their nerves. Let me put this in some kind of domestic context (which is hard, since the UK isn’t exactly surrounded by superpowers) – let’s say the Channel Islands suddenly decide they dislike the UK government (not hard to see why, but unlikely even in theory) and rebel. Obviously the first thing that the government would do (if they’re not too busy writing books, that is) once they’d extracted their heads from their respective… newspapers… is send in a body of redcoats (or possibly a more modern equivalent). Clear so far? Good.

Now what happened next was where stuff started going wrong. Medvedev, despite the high hopes I had for him creating a ‘thaw’ in relations between Russia and everyone else, proved to be even more up to his neck in pseudo-Soviet expansionism than Putin was. Apparently he wants to ‘protect Russian citizens wherever they are in the world’. Nothing wrong with that, you might say, but oh wait. Suspicious, isn’t it, how most of the residents of South Ossetia hold Russian passports despite being part of Georgia… So, without any further prompting, in come the Russian troops, and proceed not only to overrun South Ossetia, but Abkhazia as well, and then invade undisputed Georgian territory. Back to the Channel Islands example. Now all of a sudden, just as Jersey, Guernsey and all the rest have been restored to British rule, President Sarkozy announces at a press conference that the British invasion had compromised the sovereignty of the Channel Islands and pledged to protect the welfare of French citizens wherever they are (let’s assume for the purposes of this analogy that all, rather than just some, of the Channel Islanders hold French citizenship somewhere along the line). So without any further warning, the combined might of every army in the EU proceeds to swamp the Islands in European troops and opens a second and third front in the Scilly Isles and Dover respectively. Still with me? In case you’re wondering why the rest of Europe’s joined in, there are three good reasons: Georgia’s army is 20,000 strong, Russia’s is 697,000, so I wanted to give you some sense of scale; Russia is just as ethnically diverse as Europe is (think Tatars, Finns, Chechens, Russians, Azeris, Cossacks &c); and Europe ganging up on the UK is something like a combination of Richard Littlejohn’s wet dream and worst nightmare.

So where is all this going (assuming we can all get the thought of the Channel Islands’ becoming French out of our heads)? The Russians will almost certainly set up client states in Abkhazia and South Ossetia (and possibly Adjara – that’s in southern Georgia, watch out for that name in the news, it was the ‘Dover’ in my example) and use the ’sensitive situation’ there as an excuse to shift all their military service exercises ever closer to the Georgian border. They will condescend to leave Georgia alone and ‘independent’, probably in return for massive diplomatic concessions that they can never tell us because they’ll get blown skyhigh if they do, but which will probably be along the lines of ’steer clear of NATO, stick two fingers up at the USA, stay out of the EU, come join the neo-Soviet paradise, oh and GIVE US THE OIL PIPELINE’. Doubtless by the time of the next election, a pro-Russian hardliner will have emerged, who will win, the outgoing president will be assassinated and given the most cynical state funeral in history,and Georgia will suddenly not want to be friends with the West any more.

Just to close, I remember vividly giving a talk at Oxford last year in which I argued (convincingly, I thought then) that the diplomatic future of Europe lay with Russia. While the EU’s near-total silence on this whole South Ossetia business implies that the politicians there agree with me, it’s not without reason that the phrases “Rhineland”, “Sudetenland” and “Czechoslovakia” are being batted around the blogosphere along with many pictures of Neville Chamberlain. This really is appeasement at its worst, and if this is what the future of Europe is supposed to look like, then I’m going right ahead and retracting what I said last year. China, anyone?

~ by Marius Ostrowski on August 11, 2008.