Strongman (32 page)

The plenary session of NATO leaders was due at nine the following morning, but the Americans decided to try to sort it out over an early breakfast beforehand – with officials from the US,
the UK, Germany and France, plus Poland and Romania. Damon Wilson admits it was a case of gathering reinforcements: ‘We decided we needed to invite the Romanians as host of the summit and the
Poles as big players within the alliance. Obviously, these are two countries that were quite supportive of our position.’

Jean-David Levitte, the French national security adviser, recalls: ‘At one o’clock in the morning and again at three o’clock I was telephoned to make sure I fully understood at
what time and where the breakfast meeting was being held.’ But it turned out not to be an intimate, friendly breakfast, says Levitte, ‘but more like a tribunal’. A text was
cobbled together which foresaw a period of ‘intensive engagement’ by NATO towards Georgia and Ukraine, with another assessment of progress in December.

When the text was distributed just before the full session at nine o’clock, some East European leaders were furious. The presidents of Lithuania, Poland and Romania all made it clear they
found the wording ‘not even close to what we expected’. ‘They went ballistic,’ says Stephen Hadley. ‘They thought the document was a capitulation to Russian pressure
and Russian veto, and they wanted changes made.’ NATO adopts its decisions by consensus, but as the leaders settled around the huge round conference table, there was no sign of one. Frantic
efforts continued to broker a compromise, but not at the main table. Behind the heavy curtains draped around the hall, small constellations of advisers and foreign ministers gathered for ad hoc
negotiations.

In an interview, Stephen Hadley recalled the remarkable scene that followed. ‘All the foreign ministers get up and go to the back of the room, all men in grey hair and suits. And then
Angela Merkel gets up, in a nice lime-green jacket, and goes back and sits down with these grey-haired men from Central and Eastern Europe. And soon Condi goes back too, dressed to the nines, and
joins them too. And what language are they using? Of course it’s Russian! The language Angela learned in her youth in East Germany and Condi knows from her time as a Russian
scholar.’

It was Merkel who then grabbed the pen and wrote the deal-breaker sentence on a piece of paper: ‘We agree today that Georgia and Ukraine shall one day become members of NATO.’ No
mention of MAP – just affirmation that the two countries
will
join NATO. The East Europeans then protested that the words ‘one day’ were as good as saying
‘never’, so the phrase was deleted. Condoleezza Rice, who had stepped away for a few minutes, came back and was pleasantly surprised: ‘It said Georgia and Ukraine will become
members of NATO, and I thought, this is a pretty good deal, and I went to the president and said, “Take it!” ’

When the whirlwind passed, and the document was adopted, Gordon Brown leaned over to George Bush and joked: ‘I’m not sure what we’ve just done. I know we didn’t give them
MAP, but I’m not sure we didn’t just make them members!’

It was a compromise whose consequences would only sink in later. Bush and the East Europeans were happy because it promised Ukraine and Georgia membership of NATO; Merkel was happy because it
left it entirely open-ended as to when that might happen; Georgia and Ukraine were generally pleased, but unhappy to have their membership plans kicked into the long grass; and Russia was
furious.

Watching these events unfold, I found myself wondering: would it not have been better if NATO had taken Putin’s early innocent-sounding inquiries about joining NATO more seriously? Would
it not make more sense for the allies to be taking decisions together with Russia – and Georgia and Ukraine – rather than cobbling together compromises explicitly designed to take
Russia’s views into account while pretending they did not?

The roots of the problem

In the summer of 1991 I had spent several weeks in Georgia, and witnessed the first ethnic convulsions in Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Georgia had just declared itself
independent of the Soviet Union, under an earlier nationalist leader, Zviad Gamsakhurdia. Like Mikheil Saakashvili some 13 years later, Gamsakhurdia moved to restrict the autonomy of the two
territories, both of which wanted to remain within the Soviet Union. It provoked a savage backlash.

Abkhazia’s Black Sea beaches were once renowned as the Soviet ‘Riviera’, but now they were almost deserted, as Russians stayed away. The capital Sukhumi seemed to be braced for
violence, and it soon came. The civil war of 1992–93 led to a mass exodus of a quarter of a million Georgians (almost half of Abkhazia’s population), leaving the 93,000 Abkhaz, who had
accounted for just 18 per cent of the population, as the main group in their nominal national territory. The region now had
de facto
independence, supervised by Russian peacekeepers and
United Nations monitors.

In tiny South Ossetia, where Ossetians accounted for two-thirds of the almost 100,000 population, civil war had already begun. The Ossetians had tried to declare independence, and Gamsakhurdia
sent in Georgia’s National Guard to restore order. It was my first experience of war. I remember the road leading into the capital, Tskhinvali, empty and blocked at either end by armoured
vehicles and soldiers behind sandbagged barricades, as one of the bleakest places I had ever seen. Knots of Georgian refugees stood around, staring down the road to where their houses had burned
down. Some were waiting for a military escort to accompany them through Ossetian territory to Georgian villages. In Tskhinvali, still full of the communist slogans already abandoned in the rest of
Georgia, an Ossetian woman told me the kind of horror story that I would hear so often in other tortured parts of the former Soviet Union in later years: ‘Georgia doesn’t feed us. They
just kill us. They pull out people’s fingernails, gouge their eyes out, burn their houses.’ I heard Georgians tell the same kind of hysterical stories about Ossetians. In one village I
was shown a smoked-out bus in which, it was said, four Georgians had been doused with petrol and burned to death.

In a Tskhinvali school, I saw a fresh graveyard for ‘the victims of Georgian fascist terror’. Ossetians now received all their supplies from North Ossetia, through the Roki tunnel. I
wrote at the time that it was ‘hard to imagine how the two communities could ever again live at peace’.
⁹

For the next 17 years, Abkhazia and South Ossetia lived as separate entities, with tense and tenuous ties to Georgia, and a growing reliance on Russia. Under Putin their stateless citizens
received Russian passports. Like Abkhazia, South Ossetia was patrolled by a Russian-led peacekeeping force. OSCE monitors tried to keep the lid on trouble.

Logically, Putin and Saakashvili should have been on the same side over these ‘frozen conflicts’. Russia supported the regional governments, but had resisted their calls for
recognition for many years, and Putin was not at all keen to add to the Kosovo precedent by recognising them. He would then have had no argument whatsoever against the demands of Chechen
separatists. Putin’s preference was to negotiate the two regions back into Georgia, with appropriate guarantees for their autonomy. But on the other hand he would not, and could not, allow
them to be taken by force.

Galloping to war

Campaigning for re-election in January 2008 Mikheil Saakashvili vowed to recover both regions. He described the South Ossetian capital Tskhinvali as a ‘loose tooth ready
for removal’ and promised to recapture it ‘within months at the most’.
¹⁰

The Kosovo precedent and the Bucharest fudge seemed to spur him on. Perhaps he felt he must resolve the ‘frozen conflicts’ quickly, since these had been cited as the main impediment
to NATO membership. The day after the Bucharest summit, the Swedish foreign minister Carl Bildt had dinner with Saakashvili in Tbilisi, and was so alarmed by the latter’s talk of possible
military action to retake Abkhazia and South Ossetia that he called his American colleagues to warn them. Bush responded to Bildt’s news by calling Saakashvili: ‘Dear friend, let me be
clear: there is no way we will support you. Yes, you are a sovereign leader and we respect you. But you will not get US support if you choose to initiate the use of force.’

It has been suggested that Saakashvili had returned from his trip to Washington in March with the false impression that he had been given some sort of green light by President Bush to
reincorporate the rebel republics. Damon Wilson strongly denies that Bush gave any sort of encouragement for military action. ‘The president couldn’t have been clearer in underscoring
that the military course was not a viable path at all. He was encouraging the diplomatic track, cautioning against taking matters into their own hand.’
¹¹

But Saakashvili was losing faith in the diplomatic route. A few weeks before Bucharest, the State Duma had declared that ‘the path taken by the Georgian authorities towards full
integration in NATO deprives Georgia of the right to consolidate its territory and the peoples living on it’. Then, on 16 April, Russia suddenly ‘upgraded’ its diplomatic
relations with the two territories. The two moves had all the appearance of a concerted strategy to prevent the reintegration of Georgia’s regions – or even to annexe them. According to
a Russian military analyst, Pavel Felgenhauer, it was around this time that Moscow took a decision to go to war: ‘The goal was to destroy Georgia’s central government, defeat the
Georgian army, and prevent Georgia from joining NATO.’
¹²

That was certainly the feeling in Tbilisi, where some in the leadership were itching to go. A senior US official had a conversation with Georgian security ministers in April where they said:
‘The Russians have already positioned themselves to take over. We think they are preparing to move forces into our country, assembling them in Russia. We Georgians have our sources. So we
think it is better to move first rather than just wait and let them march in and take over.’

The US official responded: ‘You know that is suicide.’

And the Georgians replied: ‘Well, if they cross that red line, maybe we would rather die as true patriots and real Georgian men!’

Throughout the spring of 2008 Russia and Georgia each claimed the other was about to attack – and Abkhazia seemed the likelier flashpoint rather than South Ossetia. Russia sent troop
reinforcements to the region; the Georgians increased their forces in the Upper Kodori Valley district which they controlled. Georgia flew unmanned reconnaissance drones over the region to monitor
Russian troop movements. The Abkhaz called this a violation of their sovereignty, and Russian fighters shot some of the aircraft down. In late April the Russian foreign ministry claimed that
Georgia was planning a military intervention in Abkhazia, and Russia vowed to use ‘all’ its resources to protect Russian citizens in the two disputed territories. In early May
Condoleezza Rice expressed concern over the rising Russian troop levels in Abkhazia, and a week later the Georgians released footage shot by a reconnaissance drone which apparently confirmed the
movement and deployment of Russian troops and military hardware in Abkhazia.

At the end of May Russia announced it was sending 400 ‘unarmed’ troops to Abkhazia to repair a railway line. The Georgians took this as proof that they were preparing for an
invasion, and the leadership began frantic discussions about whether to launch a pre-emptive strike. In interviews, three members of the Georgian leadership recalled the kind of arguments they were
making at the time. Giorgi Bokeria, deputy foreign minister, said, ‘The major question was at what point does it become impossible for a sovereign state not to react, even when we don’t
know for sure if the aggression will be massive or not?’
¹³
Batu Kutelia, deputy defence minister, said, ‘Our citizens need to know that
Georgia can protect them and that Georgia can react to these actions that cause concern for the Georgian people, that their country will use all its resources to destroy that
threat.’
¹⁴
Nino Burjanadze, chair of the Georgian parliament, cautioned some restraint: ‘Some people tried to persuade the president and
myself that the Russians had rusty tanks, that we had modern equipment and that Georgia would defeat the Russians in one night. Almost all the Security Council wanted to start a military
intervention in Abkhazia.’
¹⁵

President Saakashvili, for all his eagerness to reclaim the ‘lost’ territories, decided to give diplomacy another chance. Russia, after all, had a new president, Dmitry Medvedev. And
even Prime Minister Putin was sending mixed signals. Just as the Russians were sending railway troops into Abkhazia, Putin was asked by the French newspaper
Le Monde
what he thought about
Saakashvili’s ‘peace plan for Abkhazia granting an unprecedented degree of autonomy’ and ‘giving the post of vice-president of the Georgian state to an Abkhaz
national’. ‘I very much hope that the plan proposed by Mikheil Saakashvili will gradually be introduced,’ Putin replied, ‘because it is on the whole a sound plan.’

A few days later, on the margins of a summit of post-Soviet states in St Petersburg on 6 June, Saakashvili held his first talks with Medvedev. Both men appeared to approach them in a positive
mood, as if they were really starting from a fresh piece of paper. ‘I think we will be able to resolve all the difficulties we face today and find long-term solutions. What do you
think?’ said Medvedev.

‘I agree,’ replied Saakashvili. ‘There are no unsolvable problems. There are plenty of unsolved ones, but no unsolvable ones.’

Recalling the meeting later, Saakashvili said: ‘He seemed to have a very different style from Putin. He was open, he was engaging.’ (Saakashvili has a similar recollection of his
first meeting with Putin.) The Georgian was encouraged to hear Medvedev suggest that he had ‘inherited these situations and didn’t initiate them’, and wanted to resolve the
Ossetian and Abkhazian conflicts ‘within the framework of the territorial integrity of Georgia’.
¹⁶
That amounted to a pledge that Russia
was not interested in annexing the two regions and regarded them as part of Georgia.