Strongman (35 page)

Sarkozy took with him to the talks a draft agreement which Lavrov says, ‘we corrected a little bit’. In fact the six-point document was almost obliterated with amendments, so that,
for example, the first sentence read ‘The Georgian
and Russian
forces will withdraw fully.’

Sarkozy’s adviser, Jean-David Levitte, recalls: ‘They’d completely changed the logic, it was no longer a ceasefire, it was no longer a retreat of troops, it was essentially a
way of imposing a kind of diktat on Georgia.’

Sarkozy proved to be, in the words of President Medvedev’s adviser, Sergei Prikhodko, ‘tough, very tough’. Eventually he tired of the Russians’ negotiating tactics.
‘Listen,’ he said, ‘we’ve been going round in circles with this draft. I’m picking up my pen and writing a new draft. Right, first of all the conflicting parties agree
to the non-use of force. Agreed – yes or no? Yes.’

There then followed five more points: cessation of hostilities, free access for humanitarian aid, Georgian forces to withdraw to their normal bases, Russian forces to withdraw to their position
before the outbreak of hostilities, and international talks to be held on the future status of Abkhazia and South Ossetia.

Point 5 contained an extra clause which would soon cause trouble. ‘Pending an international mechanism’, Russian ‘peacekeepers’ were to put in place ‘additional
security measures’. That was a fluid prescription, which Moscow would use to justify maintaining its troops in a wide security zone, and even in parts of Georgia proper, long after the peace
deal went into force.

Sarkozy flew to Tbilisi with the paper. But it was to point 6 that Saakashvili refused to sign up, because ‘talks on future status’ seemed to leave the question of Georgia’s
territorial integrity open. Lavrov said in an interview that the whole point of having the clause about international talks on the regions’ status was to demonstrate that Russia did not
intend to recognise them unilaterally: it would be up to an international conference to decide. But Saakashvili was adamant, and the point was changed, after a quick midnight phone-call from
Sarkozy to Medvedev in Moscow, to read: ‘talks on security and stability’ in the two regions. Those talks have continued off and on, achieving little, in Geneva ever since.

But Saakashvili had already lost the big point. On 26 August, President Medvedev suddenly announced that Russia was recognising the independence of both South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Two new
states were born, which would be recognised by only Venezuela, Nicaragua and the Pacific island of Nauru. Even Russia’s former Soviet allies would not go down that road. Russia had finally
accepted the Kosovo precedent (though not, of course, in relation to Kosovo itself). For all the world it gave the impression that annexation would be the next move, and that this had been
Russia’s intent from the outset.

I have yet to meet a Russian who looked very happy about the situation. It can be pointed out that Georgia’s NATO aspirations have been knocked for six, or that Russia has allegedly
‘increased its security’, and is now building a new naval base in Abkhazia. But without doubt Russia’s security interests would have been better served by having a peaceful
relationship with Georgia.

In the end, the tragedy of Georgia and its war with Russia may come down to the personal tragedy of one mercurial and deluded man. Nino Burjanadze, formerly a close ally of Saakashvili, says he
‘rushed into war totally convinced he would defeat the Russian army. The last time I spoke to him was five days before the war began, and I said to him: “If you start this war it will
mean the end for my country, and I will never forgive you.” ’ But another question is why Saakashvili’s supporters in the West, especially in the United States, while cautioning
him against starting a war, at the same time encouraged his belief that he could get away with it. Angela Merkel and others knew about his impetuousness, yet NATO recklessly insisted on promising
his country (and Ukraine) membership – even though that made Russia feel insecure. To this day, no serious attempt has been made to visualise a future in which all the countries of Europe and
North America might act together to ensure their security, rather than imagining that the security of some can be built at the expense of the security of others.

The events described in this chapter illustrate better than any in the past 12 years the failure of Russia and the West to understand one another and to take one another’s concerns and
fears into account. Bush preached and lectured. Putin raged and menaced. America said that Russia must give up its ‘sphere of influence’ in its ‘near abroad’. Russia said
that America should stop acting as if it ruled the world. Bush accused Putin of communist-style authoritarianism. Putin accused Bush of Cold War thinking. Both were right. The result was
inevitable.

11

Repercussions of the Caucasus war

The Russians were livid with the West for siding with Georgia over a war that it had started. They lashed out at everyone in sight, demonstrating a fragile grip on reality. The
Georgian attack on Tskhinvali was compared to the 9/11 attack on the United States. In the true tradition of Russian conspiracy theory, Vladimir Putin declared that the Americans had instigated the
whole conflict in order to shore up the position of Senator John McCain, Barack Obama’s Republican rival in the American presidential election.

The foreign minister Sergei Lavrov claimed that certain foreign powers decided to use Saakashvili ‘to test the strength of Russian authority’ and ‘to force us to embark on the
path of militarisation and abandon modernisation’. The minister insisted the Russians had done nothing more than take out positions from which the Georgians could attack them. Speaking to the
British foreign secretary David Miliband on his cellphone, Lavrov referred to Mikheil Saakashvili as a ‘fucking lunatic’.

The Russians appeared to be oblivious to the fact that they were in the international doghouse having invaded and occupied a large part of a neighbouring country. At the end of August, President
Medvedev made his first – of several – attempts to draw weighty conclusions from the war. He enunciated five new ‘principles’ of Russian foreign policy, some of which had
alarming implications. Principle number four declared that defending the lives and dignity of Russians,
wherever they might be
, was the priority. This included ‘protecting the
interests of our business community abroad’. Anyone who committed an aggressive act against them would be rebuffed, Medvedev promised. Point five declared that there were regions where Russia
had ‘privileged interests’. This appeared to include all the neighbouring post-Soviet countries, where ethnic Russians lived. Medvedev pointedly did not use the expression ‘sphere
of influence’ – but that is essentially what he meant. It implied that former Soviet republics such as Estonia and Latvia, now members of the EU and NATO but with large Russian
minorities, were officially considered part of Moscow’s domain. The new policy was, perhaps, the precise opposite of what one might have expected a chastened Russia to adopt following the
Georgia crisis.

Showing no sign of humility, the Russians saw the war as a pretext to plough on with their old, already rejected initiatives. In October President Medvedev rushed to a conference in Evian,
France, and reiterated his call for a new European security treaty, saying events in the Caucasus had ‘demonstrated how absolutely right’ his idea was, and were ‘proof that the
international security system based on unipolarity no longer works’. What was he saying? Had he forgotten that it was his country that had just violated the security and territorial integrity
of a neighbour? His long-winded appeal for a new treaty fell mostly on deaf ears. This really was, as Saakashvili might have put it, the fox demanding co-ownership of the chicken-house.

As for Vladimir Putin, his new post as prime minister meant that the economy, rather than foreign policy, was now his major responsibility. That, too, gave him the levers to meddle in a region
of ‘privileged interest’. The main lever was Gazprom, the huge state monopoly he had refused to allow his ministers to split up in 2002, which was now a handy instrument of foreign
policy. Energy had become a convenient whip with which to punish neighbours. In 2006, a few months after the gas dispute with Ukraine, Russia cut oil supplies to Lithuania after it sold its
Mazeikiai refinery to a Polish company rather than to Rosneft. The same year, power lines to Georgia were mysteriously bombed, and Russia refused to allow Georgian investigators to see the evidence
or help with repairs. In 2007 Russia cut oil shipments to Estonia following a row over the removal of a Soviet war memorial.

Towards the end of 2008 another gas conflict with Ukraine was brewing, as Russia again insisted on raising its prices to world levels, and Ukraine refused to pay. This time, with a Western
public relations firm on board, the Kremlin tried to pre-empt the bad publicity. They warned Ukraine (and customers farther west) of the impending conflict, and Gazprom sent its top executives on a
tour of European capitals to ensure that, if supplies were interrupted, like three years before, people would know it was Ukraine’s fault, not Russia’s. But no one predicted that Putin
would go so far as to deliberately cut supplies intended not for Ukraine but for Western Europe.

Gazprom was owed $2.4 billion by Ukraine for gas already delivered, and wanted to raise the price for 2009 to $250 (and after a few days to $450) per 1,000 cubic metres – a price Ukraine
could not pay. On 1 January 2009 Gazprom cut gas supplies, just as it had done in 2006. To make up for the shortfall – again, just as in 2006 – Ukraine began siphoning gas from the
export pipelines, and soon customers in Hungary, Austria, Bulgaria, Romania and other countries noticed a considerable drop in pressure. But this time there was no quick resolution, and European
countries began to panic. Slovakia even considered restarting a mothballed nuclear power station.

On 5 January Putin took an astonishing decision. He called in the head of Gazprom, Alexei Miller, plus television cameras, and used the following stilted conversation to announce that for the
first time ever Russia would cut gas supplies to customers in Western Europe – mere bystanders to the dispute with Ukraine – in the middle of a freezing winter.

Thus it was that Putin, feigning pity for the poor people of Ukraine, ‘agreed to a suggestion’ to cut supplies of gas intended for transit through Ukraine to Central and Western
Europe. It was the first time Russia – or the Soviet Union – had ever cut supplies to its customers in the West. The action destroyed Russia’s fundamental argument, that it had
always been, and would always be, a reliable energy supplier.

The decision was the last straw for the European Union. The Americans had long been urging its partners to diversify supplies in order to break Moscow’s stranglehold. Now it became urgent.
The EU began exploring every possible alternative energy supplier – from Algeria to Iran to Turkmenistan. Putin’s decision gave fresh impetus to the so-called Nabucco project, a planned
pipeline that would bring gas to central Europe from Turkmenistan or Azerbaijan via Turkey, Bulgaria and Romania – avoiding Russia.

Nabucco was seen as a rival to Russia’s own ‘alternative’ route – the South Stream pipeline, which would supply Russian gas via the Black Sea, Bulgaria and Serbia. Plans
were already well advanced, too, for the Nord Stream pipeline under the Baltic Sea – yet another alternative to supplying Europe via Ukraine. Russia didn’t quite get (or pretended not
to get) the Western argument, which was that Russia itself could no longer be trusted as a reliable supplier. Russia put the blame entirely on Ukraine as a transit country, and proffered Nord
Stream and South Stream as routes for Russian gas that would avoid potential disruption in the future by Ukraine. The EU feared that this could leave not only Ukraine but also Poland (another
transit country) open to blackmail in the future: Russia, faced with a dispute with Poland or Ukraine, would be able to cut gas to those countries while continuing to supply countries further west
via the new pipelines. For the Europeans, Nabucco seemed a safer bet, cutting Russia out of the equation altogether. But the fact remained that potential supplies for Nabucco were scarce (Russia
had already bought up Turkmen gas for years in advance), and in any case Russia, with its enormous energy resources, was fated to remain a major supplier for the foreseeable future. But after
Putin’s intervention on 5 January 2009 it would never be fully trusted.