Russia

After his heady nights of rough and tumble in the Caucusus, Putin has left Medvedev holding the baby.

That is the argument of at least one Russian commentator, writing in the popular mainstream web newspaper Gazeta ru.

Vladimir Milov believes that Putin has avoided any public spotlight since his high profile control over the war in its first days; getting praise for the successfully fighting off the Georgians but leaving Medvedev the harrowing task of cleaning up the ensuing mess.

“Putin, realising that his ‘blitzkrieg’ in Georgia had failed, decided to detach himself from the operation and retreat into the shadows. When the West understood that deposing Saakashvili may be Russia’s ultimate goal, it created a 24 hour human shield around Tbilisi consisting of high profile officials. This made any ‘march on Tbilisi’ unrealistic. As there was no longer any reason to continue the war, Putin tasked Medvedev with sorting out the highly unpleasant political fall-out from the crisis and facing up to the international community.

If that is indeed what happened, then the relationship between Medvedev and Putin must have suffered an inevitable crack: a dual-presidency is only possible in a time of calm. During a crisis, all bets are off.

Putin’s desire to take control of the situation without accepting any of the responsibility could turn him into a serious enemy in Medvedev’s eyes. It is possible that the relationship between the two men could change much sooner than they had both anticipated.

It’s hard not to take this rather chilling prognosis seriously. After all, Putin’s own accession followed very similar lines. But if Medvedev is in fact out to bury his mentor, could we expect the same sort of radical policy U-turn that Putin engineered after he took over from Yeltsin?

It’s unlikely. Contrary to the common yet simplistic and misleading interpretation, there is not really any clear palace struggle between the siloviki (Putin’s strong men and KGB veterans) and the liberals (the Westernisers and pro-marketers, like Medvedev).

In a probing article from several months ago, Mark Ames wisely reminds us that Putin is as much a liberal as Medvedev, or Nemtsov for that matter:

Just as Georgia’s leader Mikhail Saakashvili is a liberal, even though he sent his shock troops wilding on opposition protestors, exiled his political opponents and shut down the opposition media. All of this talk of “liberals” on the ascendant or on the decline in the Putin Era is nonsense. Liberals are the Putin Era. And so are the siloviki, who still constitute the same 70-percent of the Russian elite today as they did last week, before their supposed decline. The reason they’re in power isn’t because of some deep ideological desire to create a neo-Fascist state, but rather, because that’s who Putin grew up with, and Putin rules a country steeped in clan culture.

If this sounds too much like a scene out of Boris Godunov, it’s worth remembering that such situations are not unique to Russia at all, or even to ‘authoritarian states’. Who can seriously argue that there was any real ideological difference between Gordon Brown and Tony Blair, or between David Miliband and Brown today?

(What really infuriated the Russian in me most about those English leadership squabbles was how often the word ‘coup’ was thrown about. As in, oooh! X is plotting a coup against Y! These effete, decadent morons not only manage to have coups over nothing, but ones in which no one dies, and no government buildings are bombed! Call that a coup? Now THIS is a coup!)

So, to get a sense of Russia’s current squalid, bloodless succession crisis devoid of any Orientalist gloss, think of the difference between Putin’s silovikism and Medvedev’s liberalism as that between Brown’s Old Labour and Miliband’s New Labour. And who says Russia isn’t becoming more like the West?

C’est la politique qui prime!

Russia’s recognition of Ossetia and Abkhazia baffled me. On this blog, I have frequently tried to show alternative, Russian perspectives on matters that seem otherwise to be common sense, above debate, to Western audiences. But I just cannot see any benefits this move will bring. On the contrary, by uniting the traditionally friendly OSCE, pragmatic EU and hostile NATO in opposition, it threatens to increase Russia’s international isolation, and heighten the very encirclement that Putin had so anxiously tried to roll back with his Caucasian gambit.

In an interview with Russia Today, Medvedev raised the stakes further still:

“We are not afraid of anything, including the possibility of a new cold war. But of course, we don’t desire it”.

Not one other country has recognised the breakaway republics.

Indeed, while “it would be an exaggeration to say that Russia finds itself in international isolation, writes the Russian political scientist Fyodor Lukyanov, “Russia has clearly found itself in a vacuum. No one has supported Moscow’s actions, although for various reasons”.

In his illuminating and clear-headed essay for Radio Liberty, Lukyanov goes on to state that:

“Russia has demonstrated that it is able and willing to use force outside its borders in order to defend its national interests. This leaves neighboring countries faced with the question of how to ensure their own security…And Russia has to answer an equally important question: What are the criteria for determining those genuinely essential national interests in the name of which it is justified to use military force?

Very important questions, which should have been answered BEFORE any shots were fired. Yet perhaps Lukyanov’s most important observation is that Russia and the US appear to have “incompatible strategic horizons”.

Russia is a global power with regional ambitions. That is, it is ready to exchange its opportunities in distant regions like Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and the Far East in exchange for its interests in the regions that border it — Europe and Eurasia. That is, Moscow has a clear hierarchy of its priorities.

The United States is a superpower with global ambitions. A global leader does not have secondary interests. It isn’t possible to sacrifice anything or make trades because if something starts to totter in one place, it could trigger a domino effect. Therefore, everyone else must be pushed back as much as possible. As a result, no constructive dialogue is possible.

Whether or not one endorses the rather bleak conclusion, it is undeniable that a new relationship must be negotiated between Russia and the US-led West.

All my friends have been asking me: why does Russia just not seem to care what other countries think of it? Surely there could have been more conciliatory, diplomatic things that Medvedev could have said etc? The truth is, I’m not sure how useful that would have been. George HW Bush famously said that the USA does not apologise to anyone. It is very doubtful that ‘politeness’ achieves anything in relations with other countries, whose ties are based on shared interests, not good vibrations. But it could cost you domestically. Just think of how Obama’s foreign trip was interpreted by the right wing press as ‘pandering to France’ and ‘apologising for America’. Leaders have every incentive to sound tough, and the tougher, the better. Does anyone really believe that if Medvedev had been more balanced and understanding that Bush and NATO would have changed their Caucasus policy in his favour?

In fact, that is precisely what Gorbachev did in the late 1980s, and the near-universal perception in Russia is that the West royally took advantage of that to beat Russia while it was down. Gorbachev made a very big deal of sharing Western values, of transcending the old politics of division, of believing in universal human rights and individual free choice. And the West loved him back. But did all that Gorbymania stop America and West Germany from wresting concession after concession from the spluttering USSR? Nothing personal, just business!

So now it’s no more Mr Nice Guy, goes the thinking, because Russia’s learnt the hard way exactly where they finish.

The latest edition of Private Eye, the finest satirical/investigative journal in the English language, is all about Russia & Georgia, with an Olympic flavour:

Let’s have a look, shall we?

And the party-political angle:

Western retaliation against Russia for its actions in Georgia will do it more good than harm, according to the academic and actvist Boris Kagarlitsky.

As Russian troops finally begin to withdraw from Georgia, the US and Nato are pondering the best punishment for its earlier invasion.

The respected International Crisis group suggested that “the West should deliver a firm message to Russia that if it does not respect the ceasefire deal and cooperate in implementing the international peacekeeping mission, it will be met with a serious response, including suspension of its Moscow’s World Trade Organisation application”.

Even Barack Obama is now calling to review the Russian WTO application.

But Kagarlitsky astutely notes that:

what Washington thinks is punishment for Moscow may in fact turn out to be a blessing. For example, the United States believes that blocking Russia’s entry into the World Trade Organization is one way to retaliate. But for Russia’s domestic industries — particularly when there is a global economic downturn — entry into WTO would be a death sentence. Therefore, if this sentence will be postponed, the Kremlin can only thank the United States and Georgia.

As if that wasn’t enough, the other sanctions considered would reduce corruption, improve civil society, and even protect the environment!

Washington and London are threatening to investigate the bank accounts of senior Russian officials that are held abroad. It’s surprising that this wasn’t done earlier. Russians can only benefit if the United States leads a new fight against money laundering, particularly when it involves top officials from the Russian government. Moreover, NATO is threatening to suspend joint military exercises with Russia. That means Russia will save a nice amount of money and fuel. Finally, in light of the increased tension, liberal opposition groups in Moscow will receive more active help from the West. This is also beneficial because new financing will mean the creation of new media outlets, new nongovernmental organizations and new jobs.

You don’t have to be Max Moseley to enjoy this kind of ’slap-down’!

Every happy president is happy in his own way; all unhappy presidents resemble one another, by going to war to boost their approval ratings.

(Medvedev approval rating courtesy of Levada Center poll, quoted in “Reiting Voennogo Vremeni”, Gazeta.ru, 20 Aug 2008).

This is the sort of thing that makes me want to eat my tie.

Had the exhortations for Russia to get media-savvy become lost in translation?

Having achieved its military objectives at the expense of widespread international condemnation for bullying its smaller neighbour and generally not giving a damn about public perceptions, Russia needed some serious damage control, especially considering that it could make a strong case against the original Georgian incursion into Ossetia.

Putin, the man in charge of the operation, is not known for thin skinned sensitivity to what the world thinks of his country, as long as it involves a healthy dose of fear and respect.

So the sight of ‘good cop’ Medvedev heading down to the Caucusus momentarily promised some much-needed mollification, perhaps a smooth, deftly handled press conference directed and produced by Steven Spielberg, featuring children singing in American accented English, a friendly robot (a Medvedev cameo?), Abkhaz and Georgian orphans frolicking with dolphins!

Instead, we got Ivan Drago.

According to a great piece by Anna Smolchenko at the Moscow Times,

Medvedev repeatedly resorted to the kind of abrasive language typical of Putin.

On Friday, he said, “It is necessary to restore and guarantee peace in the region so that no one gets any more idiotic ideas in their heads.” At a Kremlin news conference with French President Nicolas Sarkozy last week, Medvedev fired off epithets like “bastards” and “hoodlums.”

“If anyone thinks that they can kill our citizens, kill our soldiers and officers, who are peacekeepers, and escape unpunished, we will never allow this,” Medvedev said. “If anyone tries this again, we will deliver a crushing response.”

“Crushing response”??? Really????? I am just speechless. Have they learned NOTHING from all this?!! Because, the one thing most people in the world are all too aware of when it comes to Russia, from the endless Fox and CNN newsreels, is its capability of crushing things, like responses, or cars and civilian apartment buildings.

But wait, here’s the kicker, folks:

Representatives of the foreign press, meanwhile, were barred from attending any events during Medvedev’s trip. Members of the Russian press, however, were loaded onto a bus chartered by the Defense Ministry to meet the president at the airport. Access to the zone of conflict and to government officials has been sharply curtailed for the foreign press in recent weeks, making accurate coverage of what is going on inside South Ossetia extremely difficult.

Standing outside the Hotel Vladikavkaz as Russian reporters streamed into the press bus, a producer for NBC News in Moscow asked Defense Ministry spokesman Andrei Klyuchnikov if he knew how bad barring the Western press from such a significant news event looked.

Klyuchnikov simply shrugged.

“Yes,” he said, the door to the bus closing in front of him. “I know.”

You couldnt make it up.

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There are also wider issues raised in the piece, especially the question of who is really in charge, who planned the war, and whether a power-struggle is brewing between Putin and Medvedev.

There are additional questions of the Russian troop withdrawals, tentative and still ongoing.

Now that the artillery smoke has lifted and Sarkozy and Medvedev’s 6 point ceasefire plan is imposed on Georgia, it’s time to figure out: what the hell happened between last Thursday and now?

Gary Brecher has the most elegant, if undeniably sociopathic, explanation:

1. The Georgians started it.
2. They lost.
3. What a beautiful little war!

Except, there was more than one war; and which one you were following depended on where you lived.

The US media covered the Russian invasion of Georgia and its airstrikes on Gori, while the Russian media covered the Georgian invasion of South Ossetia and its attacks on Tskhinvali, its capital. And there was no overlap.

For example, on all of last night’s three major CNN news shows - the Election Center, Anderson Cooper 360, and Lou Dobbs Tonight - there was no more than one mention of Ossetia itself, of any Georgian atrocities or Ossetian refugees. It was all pictures of the aftermath of Russian raids on Gori, Russian tanks rolling into Georgia, with captions like “Russia invades”. Yet, as CNN itself reports in a paragraph buried on its website,  “up to 100,000 people are thought to have been displaced by the violence, which has left South Ossetia’s capital of Tskhinvali in ruins”. Moreover, as the brilliant journalist Margarita Akhvlediani writes, Reuters has reported that up to 2,000 civilians in Tskhinvali, the South Ossetian capital, are dead.

So why does CNN care more about Russian violence in Gori than Georgian violence in Tskhinvali?

Of course, a mirror-image situation exists in Russia, which has asserted that up to 1500 people have been killed by Georgian forces in South Ossetia as part of an alleged ethnic cleansing operation, and where the media have been largely quiet on the air bombing of the Gori apartment blocks. In the rare event that these reports have appeared on the Russian news (just as a minority of US shows, like Countdown with Keith Olbermann, have reported on Georgian attacks in Ossetia) they remained in the distinct minority. But it is notable that much of this selective coverage has been down to government censorship, with journalists who had been reporting on the sorties, like Russia today’s William Dunbar, being taken off the air.

What is troubling is the US media’s willingness to similarly tow the party line, but in the absence of any of the coercive measures, such as the state censorship, that the Russian press endures. There have been no William Dunbars on CNN, despite the fact that every report I’ve seen on the channel yesterday had been framed as “Russian invasion”, with endless clips of Saakashvili alleging Russian crimes etc, in a loop of totally pro-Georgian coverage. Georgia is a key US ally, the 3^rd largest troop contingent in Iraq, and occupies a strategic, oil rich zone. The self-policing in the US media, which has basically been uncritically promoting government talking points, is very disturbing.

To the uninformed viewer, it was Russia, not Georgia, which used the cover of the Olympic games to invade; in reality, they both did. In addition, there have been several mentions of Georgia as a fledgling democracy, but no mention of Saakashvili’s recent crackdown on the media and civil society. The US media has been guilty of a procrustean tendency to distil a messy conflict between two flawed states into a Manichean struggle between good and evil; as Campbell Brown said yesterday: “there’s much more at stake here than the freedom of a former Soviet republic and Russia’s attempt to big-foot itself back onto the World Stage”.

And how’s this for hysteria, from CNN’s breathless hack Ed Henry reporting live from the White House on Monday night:

“…What’s really going on is that Russia is trying essentially to reconstitute the old soviet union.bring back the old spheres of influence. if you take over Georgia today, what’s next? Could they then move into the Ukraine (sic), could they take over the Czech Republic? These are awful options that are on the table, but theres a fear that if they start here and are not stopped, what happens next?”

On distinct occasions, I noticed straight factual inaccuracies. For example, both Campbell Brown and Lou Dobbs consistently asked why Russia was refusing to agree to international demands for a cease fire, when in fact Russia had convened the UN Security Council for just such a ceasefire last week, only to be rebuffed by the United States. As an AP story from August 9^th, and quoted in Mark Ames’s excellent article for The Nation, put it:

“At the request of Russia, the U.N. Security Council held an emergency session in New York but failed to reach consensus early Friday on a Russian-drafted statement.

The council concluded it was at a stalemate after the United States, Britain and some other members backed the Georgians in rejecting a phrase in the three-sentence draft statement that would have required both sides “to renounce the use of force,” council diplomats said.”

Of course, there can be no room for such inconvenient nuance on CNN if the Georgian use of force in Ossetia and Abkhazia is not mentioned to begin with and the conflict is framed exclusively in terms of the Russian invasion.

In addition, there have also been no mentions of Kosovo, despite the fact that Russia widely sees the West’s sponsorship of Kosovo breaking from Serbia as a precedent for Ossetia breaking from Georgia.

As I have pointed out in my last post, the US and, to a lesser extent, British media have been very quick to jump on the Russia bashing, jingoist bandwagon, hungry for the reinstatement of the Cold War narrative. Here are two excellent articles exposing this tendency:

http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/news/2008/08/how_russia_became_a_bear_again.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/aug/11/georgia.russia1

Even more unnervingly, are we in fact witnessing the crystallisation of a ‘CNN effect’? On both Lou Dobbs and the Election Centre, Obama was criticised for not taking a strong enough stance on Russia in the wake of its invasion. Here is a sample quote from Campbell Brown from yesterday’s programme:

“John McCain…saw an opportunity here. He was quick to condemn Russia, he’s been keeping up the sort of steady drum beat. Obama a little more cautious, at least initially, in his statements. He’s since toughened up his stance. Should he have come out stronger right from the get-go?”

Yes, you are not mistaken: that was the word ‘drum-beat’, as in ‘drum-beat to war‘, used in a positive way, by a news host. Of course, McCain’s stance was to be expected, writes Mark Ames,

“considering McCain’s raving Russophobia, and his campaign team’s financial and ideological ties to Saakashvili. As has been reported, McCain’s top foreign policy advisor, neocon Randy Scheunemann, has a long financial relationship with Saakashvili to lobby his interests in the United States.

On Monday, only Obama had made any reference to Ossetia, and only Obama had called on Georgia to rein in its offensive there. Yet, some time after his comments were circulated, Obama made another press conference, this time being much harder on Russia.

While it is impossible to establish causality, I can’t help thinking that the press was at least partly responsible for pushing him into a more hard-line position. McCain’s hawkish position has been almost universally derided by the independent strategic and foreign policy community as irresponsible and inflammatory, yet it seemed to be endorsed by the mainstream media, who seem to love their drum-beating!

The press’s credulity of official US government positions, easy embrace of jingoism and susceptibility to hawkishness reminded me queasily of its very similar performance in run up to the Iraq war. Have any lessons been learned? More importantly, is there some structural feature of the free press that explains this effortless falling-into-line? Does the Obama/McCain vignette show that press pressure can in fact actually escalate conflict?

So is it any wonder that, despite the fact that, as Mikhail Gorbachev writes in the Washington Post, that Georgian leaders badly miscalculated when “they could get away with a “blitzkrieg” in South Ossetia”, no matter how much “the quick and easy victory exposes the west’s lack of leverage over a resurgent Russia despite years of heavy American political investment in Georgia”, the war will have been a military victory for Russia, but a PR defeat.

In fact, so successful has been Saakashvili’s wooing of the Western media that, according to Mark Ames,

No one’s bothering to ask what the Ossetians themselves think about it, or why they’re fighting for their independence in the first place. That’s because the Georgians–with help from lobbyists like Scheunemann–have been pushing the line that South Ossetia is a fiction, a construct of evil Kremlin neo-Stalinists, rather than a people with a genuine grievance.

In an article headlined “Russia has Lost the War”, the online daily Gazeta ru reaches very similar conclusions, after an analysis of Russian, Georgian and Western press treatment of the conflic.t It suggests that another reason for Western press’s favourable treatment of Georgia was the relatively greater access and support it gave to foreign journalists, where Russia’s propaganda effort focused much more heavily on its own media.

Modern conflicts are fought in the ‘courtroom of public opinion’, as Adlai Stevenson said at the UN during the Cuban Missile Crisis. It’s time for Russia to get media-savvy.

—— —– —– —– —– —– —– —– AND ALSO —– —– —– —– —– —– —– —– —– —– —–

FOLLOW THE OIL:

Something that surprised me was the candid (and frankly, quite callous) mention of oil interests as motivators of US interest. Here is CNN Anchor Campbell Brown explaining why Americans should care about Georgia:

Georgia is a vital gateway to the rich and untapped oil and natural gas fields around the caspian sea.to get to that energy market, you really have to go to Georgia. and look to the south - you have to go through Iran, not good. Go east or south, you run into Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Afghanistan, countries that to say the least are not known for stable governments. Go North, you hit Russia, which already controls much of the oil and natural gas being sold to Europe, and wouldn’t mind controlling more. That leads a little path to the north west across Georgia. Whoever controls Georgia controls the flow of oil and gas.

BEST SUMMING UP OF THE WAR:

Gary Brecher:

The bottom line will be simple: the Georgians overplayed their hand and got slapped, and we caught a little of the follow-through, which is what happens when you waste your best troops—and Georgia’s, for that matter—on a dumb war in the wrong place. We detatched Kosovo from a Russian ally; they detached South Ossetia from an American ally. It’s a pawn exchange, if that. If it signals anything bigger, it’s the fact that the US is weaker than it was ten years ago and Russia is much, much stronger than it was in Yeltsin’s time. But anybody with sense knew all that already.

A QUESTION OF RUSSOPHOBIA?

As I was thinking about the reasons for US media coverage of the conflict, I read a very compelling and thoughtful rumination on Russophobia and the media from Timothy Post, an American buinessman and blogger living in Krasnodar.:

There’s a significant disconnect between what I see daily with my own eyes and what I read in the Western media. The question keeps bumping around in my brain, Why do so many people in the West hate Russia?

NOT ALL MAINSTREAM MEDIA COVERAGE WAS RUBBISH:

Post also has on his site a valuable run down of some of the best mainstream media coverage of the conflict, which is very much worth reading especially after hearing all the above tales of woe.

Symbolism seems to always precede Russia into war. In the winter of 1994-5, Chechnya’s capital, Grozny, bloodily fulfilled its Russian translation as “fierce”: thousands died in the wake of Yeltsin’s callous Christmas day invasion.

But Gori, the name of the first Georgian city bombed by Russian aircraft this weekend, translates simply as ‘grief’.

When, at work, I watched the footage of an aftermath of one of these raids, the sacking of an apartment block by Russian planes, I cried, struck by how much the target resembled my grandfather’s building just several hundred miles away, in the southern Russian city of Voronezh; in the expressions of the wounded pensioners who would normally gossip on the benches outside, who had probably fought alongside him in the war and now 65 years later sat bloodied and dazed in the courtyard, there was nothing but simple grief, not even anger.

The raids are numbingly, chokingly absurd: Russia could’ve saved the ignominy and fuel, and bombed Voronezh itself: for we are all citizens of Gori, not because Georgia is ‘actually’ Russia, or should belong to Russia - it is not and cannot - but because the one thing a bomb hurled from a Sukhoi jet can’t ‘neutralise’ is the 80 year story that, however coersively, however cynically, unjustifiably or cruelly, had bound the ex-citizens of the USSR together as inextricably as a rocket binds metal, concrete and flesh. That the same Putin who had famously called the collapse of the USSR the single biggest catastrophe of the 20th century could have unleashed such violence against its still impoverished, shell-shocked orphans is incomprehensible, nauseating, unpardonable.

Yet equally shameful has been the press coverage of this tragedy, by both American and Russian media. In the West, the Guardian has been perhaps the only outlet to have avoided a knee-jerk anti Russian stance. In today’s paper, Peter Walker decries how, “to the UK press, Russia is once again a fierce grizzly bear”:

Most UK papers, while critical of Georgia for triggering the current South Ossetia crisis through its ill-advised intervention in the breakaway region, are beginning to side firmly against Russia.

The Daily Telegraph even manages to squeeze a claim of Russian “ethnic cleansing” into its lead story while, curiously, failing to detail who made the allegation, let alone give any evidence supporting this.

Also in the Guardian, the conservative James Poulos laments the credulous press treatment of Georgia’s role in the violence (it is hardly ever mentioned that Saakashvili had been the first to use the Olympics as cover for a Chechnya-style invasion of Ossetia). He writes that

the anti-Russia lobby is giving the pro-Israel lobby a run for its money, hyping the settling of scores among two European, Orthodox Christian countries as more dangerous to the peace and security of the west than any clash of civilisations or jihad ever was.

Chillingly, he notes the dangers of turning Russia into an enemy: “which, indeed, would be a far more formidable foe than Iran, Hizbullah, and al-Qaida combined”. He quotes a scathing Washington Post editorial, as blatant in its hypocrisy as in its criticism of Russia:

The editors of the Washington Post have railed that:

The principles at stake, including sovereignty and territorial integrity, apply well beyond the Caucasus. To abandon Georgia and its fragile democratic Rose Revolution would send a terrible signal to other former Soviet and Warsaw Pact republics that to Moscow’s dismay have achieved or are working toward democracy and fully independent foreign policies.

Would that these sacrosanct principles had applied to Serbia, which fought on just those grounds to keep Kosovo an integral part of its recognised territory.

Perhaps the most surprising and sick aspect of most Western reporting on the war has been the absence of almost any mention of Ossetia itself: coverage of Russian sorties over Gori had displaced investigation of the alleged 1400 killed in Georgian attacks on Tskhinvali; just as the Russian incursion into Ossetia had displaced the earlier and Georgian raid on the breakaway province, which had come, underhandedly, just hours after the conclusion of negotiations. This conflict has now become another chapter in the Great Game between Russia and the West, fought by named (Georgian) and nameless (Ossetian) proxies. Such exploitation of human suffering in the service of a good guy-bad guy, us vs them, freedom vs authoritarianism re-heating of the Cold War narrative is cheap, and gut-wrenchingly callous.

Somewhat ironically, the right-populist British tabloid the Sun was one of the few to suggest the blunt truth behind at least some of the Western interest in the conflict: “Georgia is pro-Western and has troops in Iraq. The £2 billion Baku-Tbilisi-oil and gas pipeline passes through Georgia on its way to supplying the West”.

Of course, the US and European press were not alone in unquestioningly validating the jingoism of their countries’ leaders. At the same time as Russian “Deputy Foreign Minister Grigory Karasin said Sunday that Western media had failed to show the plight of Ossetians and what was left of their capital after it was almost razed by Georgian troops”, the Moscow Times’s Anatoly Medetsky reveals how journalists reporting about Russian violence in Georgia are prevented from going on air. Such was the fate of William Dunbar, a correspondent for Russia Today, whose reports from Gori were blatantly censored:

“The real news, the real facts of the matter, didn’t conform to what they were trying to report, and therefore, they wouldn’t let me report it, [said Dunbar].

“I felt that I had no choice but to resign,” he added.

For their part, Georgian authorities have taken Russian media off the air, and blocked access to any internet sites in the “.ru” domain.

As I write, Russian troops are securing Abkhazia and continuing their advance into Georgia proper; it is not clear how far they will go, how long this tragedy will trample the lives of Ossetian, Georgian, Abkhaz and Russian civilians. It is not clear how Saakashvili will pay for his egregious miscalculation that the West would come to his aid against his northern neighbour; how the Georgian nationalists from whom he drew so much support will punish him for the increasingly irrevocable loss of Georgian control over its breakaway regions; how Ossetians will retaliate for Georgian atrocities in Tskhinvali and the Georgian people ever forgive Russia for its fratricide in Gori.

It is left only to hope against hope that reason and love will, if not prevail, then at least dare to stand firm and tall and strong against this mindless horror; as did Georgia’s Nino Salukvadze and Russia’s Natalya Paderina - sports shooters of all people! - whose simple hug on the Olympic podium pierced, however naively, fleetingly, momemtarily, the fog of war with the possibility of redemption.

As the tragedy in Ossetia unfolds, Mark Almond’s sobering and essential antidote to prevailing interpretation cautions against seeing the Russian incursion into Georgia as a replay of Prague 1968. Instead, he suggests a parallel with Britain’s role in the Falkland War.

Importantly, he also reminds readers that:

Unlike in eastern Europe, for instance, today in breakaway states such as South Ossetia or Abkhazia, Russian troops are popular. Vladimir Putin’s picture is more widely displayed than that of the South Ossetian president, the former Soviet wrestling champion Eduard Kokoity. The Russians are seen as protectors against a repeat of ethnic cleansing by Georgians.

In 1992, the west backed Eduard Shevardnadze’s attempts to reassert Georgia’s control over these regions. The then Georgian president’s war was a disaster for his nation. It left 300,000 or more refugees “cleansed” by the rebel regions, but for Ossetians and Abkhazians the brutal plundering of the Georgian troops is the most indelible memory.

Almond’s astute piece finishes with a compelling and difficult point:

To date the west has operated radically different approaches to secession in the Balkans, where pro-western microstates get embassies, and the Caucasus, where the Caucasian boundaries drawn up by Stalin, are deemed sacrosanct.

In the Balkans, the west promoted the disintegration of multiethnic Yugoslavia, climaxing with their recognition of Kosovo’s independence in February. If a mafia-dominated microstate like Montenegro can get western recognition, why shouldn’t flawed, pro-Russian, unrecognised states aspire to independence, too?

Are things really coming to a head in the Caucuses?

Violence is escalating in Ingushetia (bordering Chechnya), Sochi, South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

Edward Lucas has written a lucid overview of the Russian conflict with Georgia and whether we are on a cusp of a major war.

A Russian position on the Ossetia question is here, arguing that the Kosovo precedent, along with the US push for Georgian and Ukrainian NATO membership, are muddying the waters.

Recently, Israel had acceded to Russian demands to stop supplying Georgia with arms.

Let’s see how things develop and hope that a full escalation can be avoided.