I know what it is to try to build your own nation when danger is knocking on the door.[Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili]Of course, no one expected Putin to allow Saakashvili to show such public contempt for Russia with impunity. And, given his penchant for old KGB tactics, it was entirely predictable that Putin would dispatch spies to undermine Saakashvili’s democratically elected government.
This is the warning I sounded 18 months ago when Russian President Vladimir Putin began making moves to foment and enable separatist passions in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, two pro-Russian provinces in the former Soviet republic of Georgia.
It alarmed many international observers back then that he was making these moves pursuant to the geopolitical chess playing that characterized the Cold War. They failed to fully appreciate, however, that he was making them to counter what he perceived as U.S. (and EU) moves to foment and enable separatist passions in Kosovo, a province of the former Yugoslav republic of Serbia.
This is why Putin’s deployment of Russian military pawns in Abkhazia in recent weeks has so alarmed European leaders that they felt compelled to launch an aggressive diplomatic offensive this week to “defuse escalating tensions.”
But I fear EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana going on a mission now to talk peace with Putin (and his puppet Russian President Demitry Medvedev) is rather like British PM Neville Chamberlain going on a mission in 1938 to talk peace with Adolf Hitler. Because, as I have documented in a series of articles over the past few years, Putin is every bit as determined to reassert Russia’s Cold-War sphere of influence over Eastern Europe as Hitler was to assert his Nazi influence over all of Europe.
To be fair to Putin, however, he has just as much moral authority (and military power) to do what he’s doing in Georgia as President Bush had to do what he did in Kosovo; i.e., to use force to facilitate independence for a province of an independent state.
Therefore, as Bush and European leaders are uttering entreaties for peace, Putin will continue surging troops into Abkazia and South Ossetia – under the patently specious pretext of peacekeeping and helping to repair the region’s transport network.
Meanwhile, the US and EU have been effectively checkmated. Because, despite Saakashvili’s bellicose rhetoric about dire consequences if Putin does not retreat from his “large-scale military aggression” in Georgia, he knows that neither he nor his Western allies dares lift a finger to back up their words with action. And this fact is only reinforced by the U.S. implying that it would protect Georgia from Russia today in a manner that is eerily similar to the way the British promised to protect Poland just before Germany invaded in 1939.
Accordingly, I predict that it’s only a matter of time before these two (de facto independent) provinces formally reunite with their Mother Russia.
But stay tuned….
NOTE: Due to the unusually high volume of letters readers have sent to Caribbean Net News (and to me directly) about my commentaries on the political situation in the Turks and Caicos Islands, the editor asked me to draft an omnibus response. And, I was happy to oblige: here.
Related Article:
Putinization of Russia extends to Georgia
Kosovo independence
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