Ben Judah - Fragile Empire - How Russia Fell in and Out of Love With Vladimir Putin

‘We have won the right to host the 2014 winter Olympics, the economy is booming, the oil price is rising, the poverty rate amongst your subjects has fallen from 30 per cent to 13 per cent and we have even won the Eurovision song contest in your honour,’ says Medvedev. Putin nods approvingly thinking of tasks left for the government to accomplish, before announcing, ‘This means it is now time to win World War Three.’

The coloured revolutions in Ukraine, Georgia and Kyrgyzstan coincided with the oil boom and Russia paying off its international debts. This gave the Kremlin the confidence and resources to strike back. Russian foreign policy became increasingly aggressive. Kremlin ideologues began to argue for an ‘Eastern European Union’ to counterbalance a ‘declining European Union’. 75The Kremlin began to support ‘counter-Orange revolutionaries’ in Ukraine, Georgia and Kyrgyzstan and set up a network of think-tanks to promote its policies.

Russian-backed political agitation rose throughout the region. Moscow even launched cyber-attacks on Estonia and used gas cut-offs on Ukraine to force its agenda. In Europe, Russia courted a special relationship with Germany and Italy to undermine a common Western front and played divide and rule inside the EU. Globally, there were attempts to derail Western projects at the UN Security Council; investment in closer partnerships with China to counter America; demands that the US withdraw from Central Asia, including attempts to bribe Kyrgyz leaders to remove an American base and increased ties with US foes in Venezuela, Iran and Syria.

Many began to fear a new Cold War. They say that history repeats itself, first as tragedy then as farce. This observation applies to what happened between Russia and the West in 2007–8 during the ‘short Cold War’. The Cold War itself was a global struggle played out on almost every possible level – from culture, industry, space races, to proxy-wars and the arms race. The short Cold War was a much-reduced affair. Between 2007–8 the Russian establishment came to believe it was a strategic imperative to prevent NATO membership for Georgia and Ukraine. More importantly, it thought it now had the resources to defeat NATO expansion, where under Yeltsin and in Putin’s first term it had been forced to swallow it.

On these two fronts were played out a limited confrontation, which in the Caucasus ended in war. For Russians, Ukraine is not really abroad. The language, history and culture is so close and shared, and families so mixed up, that a trip there ‘does not count as being abroad’. This translates into a belief by swathes of the establishment that Ukraine is not a ‘true’ state and cannot be permitted to be ‘severed from Russia’. This goes as far as the hope of eventual reunion. As one former Russian official, who published under a pseudonym, wrote in his memoir:

Russian bureaucrats know the Soviet Union is dead. They do not know that it cannot be recreated. Indeed a re-union around a core of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus seems rather likely. 76

Stopping Ukrainian NATO membership is essential to Russian hopes for maintaining a sphere of influence or reintegrating with the two Slavic ex-Soviet states. And without a sphere of influence, Russian intellectuals lament, ‘we are just a big state’. In practice this sees Russian diplomats give various arguments from ‘having Ukraine in NATO is as intolerable as Britain seeing Ireland join the Warsaw Pact’, or, as the pro-Kremlin analyst Dmitry Suslov bluntly explained, ‘This is impossible for us as Ukraine to Russia is not Austria to Germany, but Bavaria to Germany.’ Feelings were particularly intense as huge numbers within the Russian establishment had been born in Ukraine or studied there, or have Ukrainian parents. The other side of the coin was that a successful pro-Western democracy in Ukraine would undermine Putinism by example. This is why at the NATO Bucharest Summit in 2008 Putin threatened the US and said ‘Ukraine is not really a state’, as he sought to dissuade NATO from giving it – together with Georgia – a Membership Action Plan, an agreement that starts a country’s nuts and bolts integration into the alliance.

In a different way, Georgia was a challenge. Mikhail Saakashvili, the ‘rose revolutionary’ president, pioneered a ‘Georgian model’ for post-Soviet states. Ideologically it was a fusion of reformist economic liberalism and pro-Western nationalism. It was also a threat to the Putin model because it was hugely successful in eliminating petty corruption and gangsterism. Contrary to Russia, on indicators that measure corruption, property rights and ease of doing business Tbilisi’s score rose rapidly. After the overthrows in Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan, the Georgian model was held up as a way forward. Opposition groups across post-Soviet states admired it as a successful model to exit trapped post-Soviet transitions – not Russia.

The short Cold War turned hot in Georgia in August 2008. On the night of the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympic Games a decision was taken in Tbilisi to attack and occupy South Ossetia. Saakashvili believed that reuniting – if necessary by force – with this rebel region of Georgia that had broken away in the early 1990s was his destiny and a national imperative. However, South Ossetians’ ethnic kin were mostly living next door in Russian North Ossetia. Most had with the encouragement of Moscow, acquired Russian citizenship during the 2000s. Russian officials say that the ‘Georgian Hitler’ attacked Russian peacekeepers and sought ‘genocide’. 77Most Russians, including opposition activists such as the then little-known Alexey Navalny, shared this view.

The then Georgian National Security Council chairman Alexander Lomaia said that Russian provocations and troop movements to reinforce their position in South Ossetia had placed them in what he called, ‘a Zugzwang, the chess move where you are compelled to move’. Tbilisi argued that Russian forces had moved into South Ossetia as violence in and shelling of the ethnic Georgian controlled areas round the breakaway enclave threatened the collapse of their government unless they reacted. Compelled to or not, the Georgians moved and the Georgians lost. Claims during the war of a ‘Russian invasion’ cost the Saakashvili government something more valuable than territory – its perceived integrity in international affairs.

In essence the war was the collision of three hubristic projects. The first was the Georgian hubris that it could crush two Russian mini-client states without consequences. The second was the American hubris that it could build client states out of core ex-Soviet states and integrate them into NATO without consequences. The third was the Russian hubris that it had a veto on the foreign policy choices of Georgia and Ukraine and could crush, invade and depose the leadership of an American client state without consequences. At the time, few outside ‘situations rooms’ in Russia and the West realized how close to a broader war the rivalries of the short Cold War had actually reached. If the Ukrainian ‘Orange’ president had decided to enforce his threat that the Russian fleet might not be allowed to return to its Crimean base that served as a support base during the war, the prospect of Russian troops entering Donetsk in Ukraine as well as Gori in Georgia was a real possibility.

In the bar of the Tbilisi Hotel Marriott on the night that the French President Nicholas Sarkozy flew in from Moscow with the terms of the ceasefire, one European diplomat mused, ‘power like water will find its level’, and of all three hubristic projects the Russian one was closest to the real power level. Giant posters in support of the South Ossetians were thrown up in Moscow emblazoned with the war’s start date ‘08.08.08’ and ‘Tskhinvali we are with you’. Though they claimed not to have goaded the Georgians into the war, Kremlin intellectuals began to talk, behind closed doors, of ‘Putin’s historical defeat of NATO expansion by force of arms’, or ‘the first ever direct Russian defeat of an American client state’. Weeks after the war, in a forest in eastern Siberia, Putin shot and tagged a tiger. Moving towards the beast knocked unconscious with a tranquilizer dart, he smirked, ‘She won’t forget us.’ Putin’s popularity rating had reached 83 per cent. 78The message was clear. Russia was back. This marked the peak of Putin’s popularity.