The debate still rages over which side came out of the August 7-12, 2008 war better.

It’s true that Russia crushed Georgia’s army when it stepped in to help South Ossetian rebels but its forceful reaction to the Georgian attempt to retake rebel held areas scared its European partners and isolated the country. Only Nicaragua followed Moscow and recognised both South Ossetia and another breakaway region Abkhazia as independent states after the war.

And despite an overwhelming military victory, the war also showed up technological and organisational deficiencies in Russia’s army.

For Georgia, the unsuccessful war dented its reputation as a reliable and steady ally for the West in the notoriously unstable South Caucasus. It also slowed President Mikheil Saakashvili’s NATO ambitions and undermined his popularity at home.

Both countries present starkly different versions of the war and who started it. A commission headed by a Swiss diplomat hopes to provide some answers later this year.

In the meantime the peace remains fragile, an estimated 30,000 displaced Georgians still live in temporary accommodation and relatives of those killed — Georgians, South Ossetians and Russians — will mark the anniversary.

Click for more stories on the Georgia-Russia 2008 war from Reuters AlertNet.

Russia has reversed its decision to station missiles in the Western outpost of Kaliningrad, next door to the European Union, according to Interfax.

The move would be the clearest signal so far of the start of a thaw in U.S.-Russia relations, which could be one of the major changes in U.S. President Barack Obama’s first year in office. We don’t know what commitment, if any, Obama may have given to Russian President Dmitry Medvedev on the missile shield (the two spoke by telephone earlier this week).

Obama’s scepticism about the effectiveness and utility of missile defence was clearly stated during the campaign. But since the Russians unilaterally made the Kaliningrad threat on the day of his election, the suspension of the deployment plan is a clear goodwill gesture. It follows NATO’s announcement, slipped out without fanfare earlier this week, that political relations with Moscow, frozen after the Georgia war, would resume within a few weeks.

Expect Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili to foam about appeasement.

The Obama administration has already made clear it will pursue bilateral and multilateral nuclear arms control treaties which Bush eschewed. At the very least, they will try to negotiate a new strategic arms reduction treaty to replace START 1, which expires at the end of this year. This is important because it treats Russia as a nuclear power on an equal footing with the United States, which the status-conscious Kremlin craves and the Bush administration always dismissed.

Obama realises he needs Russian cooperation for the two biggest foreign policy items on his agenda this year: trying to defang Iran’s nuclear ambitions and turn the tide in Afghanistan.

The Russians have made clear what some of the trade-offs could be: safe supply routes for U.S. and NATO forces to Afghanistan across Russia and its central Asian friends in exchange for a halt to NATO expansion along Russia’s southern border. There is no consensus in NATO to take in Ukraine and Georgia. Germany and France blocked giving them a roadmap to membership last year and the U.S. agreed reluctantly in December to put the issue on the back-burner for now.

The question is whether Obama will go further in reassuring Moscow that membership is off the table for the foreseeable future. Expect howls of betrayal from neo-cons, the Baltic states and Poland if he does. Another potential trade-off involves the U.S. postponing missile shield deployment in Poland and the Czech Republic as long as diplomatic efforts are under way to persuade Iran to stop its nuclear enrichment programme, in return for Russian agreement to tougher U.N. sanctions against Iran and postponement of delivery of high-grade S300 air defence missiles which Moscow has reportedly sold to Tehran, and which could make any U.S. air strike on Iran more difficult.

Both trade-offs would require the Obamistas to eat ideologically unpalatable craw and take flak in Washington, but that’s the prerogative of new administrations.

The implications for Europe of closer U.S. ties with Russia are mixed. The Obamistas have promised their first move in relations with Russia will be to consult European allies. But unless deftly handled diplomatically, a strategic opening to Russia could heighten fears of being bypassed in the Baltic and central European states, and cause frustration in Brussels at being out of the loop.

(Russia’s President Dmitry Medvedev speaks during a show commemorating the 65th anniversary of the lifting of the Leningrad siege in World War Two in St.Petersburg, January 27, 2009. During the war, Leningrad suffered an 872-day siege by invading German armies where starvation killed 640,000 people and bombs killed 17,000. REUTERS/RIA Novosti/Kremlin/Vladimir Rodionov/Handout (RUSSIA). )

Could it be that the gas dispute between Moscow and Kiev broke out because Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin felt personally slighted by his Ukrainian opposite number, Yulia Tymoshenko?
It may seem far-fetched that two countries would risk leaving half of Europe without gas over something so apparently petty. But a look at the sequence of events that led up to this crisis suggests there just might be something in it.

Rewind back to Oct. 2, and Tymoshenko is meeting Putin at his Novo-Ogaryovo residence outside Moscow. It is a lodge in forested parkland where, as a rule, he only invites people on whom he wants to make a good impression.

The portents were not good. Tymoshenko, often called the “Gas Princess” for the gas business she used to run in eastern Ukraine, has been a driving force behind Kiev’s push to integrate with the West and once wrote an article in a U.S. journal saying Russia had “imperial designs” on its neighbours.

Yet Putin and Tymoshenko seemed to hit it off. The Ukrainian Prime Minister, dressed in a designer outfit and looking much younger than her 47 years (she has since turned 48), radiated charm as she sat opposite her Russian colleague. Putin, the gruff former KGB spy, smiled and cracked jokes at a press briefing with Tymoshenko afterwards. And later that same evening, Putin took Tymoshenko to Gorki, where his boss Dmitry Medvedev has his own out-of-town residence, and they talked late into the night.

Most importantly, the visit ended with a deal on gas: Russia said it would not charge Ukraine market prices for gas straight away, and they agreed a memorandum which would serve as the basis for a new gas contract for 2009.

Now fast forward to December last year and – at least from the Russian perspective – Tymoshenko was going back on her word. The Russian theory goes that Tymoshenko, watching world prices for oil plummet and knowing that gas prices would eventually follow suit, decided that Ukraine should pay less for its gas than she had agreed back in October at Novo-Ogaryovo.

It should be noted that neither side ever made public what was agreed in October so it is impossible to judge if anyone has welched on the deal, and in fact Ukraine says it is Russia that is now failing to honour that agreement.

Either way, the indications from Russian officials are that Putin felt Tymoshenko had betrayed him, and was angry about it. Angry enough to start a gas war? It was probably not the only reason. It is impossible to dismiss the fact that there is a business dispute at play here. And then there is Russia’s well-known dislike for Ukraine’s pro-Western policies. But the theory is at least worth adding to the mix. We already know Putin is a man who takes politics personally. He did, after all, threaten to hang Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili up by his genitals.

The thought of Russian warships cruising the waters of the Caribbean instinctively revives memories of such Cold War episodes as the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962.

Russia is sending a heavily armed nuclear-powered cruiser and other ships, aircraft and troops for a joint naval exercise with Venezuela, its first big manoeuvres in the United States’ self-declared backyard since the end of the Cold War.

It is extremely unlikely the deployment will provoke a crisis as dangerous and dramatic as 1962, but it is still an irritant to Washington.

Venezuela under President Hugo Chavez has replaced Fidel Castro’s Cuba as its chief bugbear in Latin America.

Spouting anti-imperialist rhetoric, Chavez has led a socialist revolution aimed at countering a century of U.S. influence — some might say meddling — in the region. He counts as allies leaders such as Bolivia’s Evo Morales as well as many poor people. 

He has backed up his actions with largesse from Venezuela’s oil wealth. Ironically, a lot of those dollars come from the United States. Venezuela is its fifth-largest oil supplier, a trade relationship which has hobbled Washington’s reactions to Chavez’s adventures.

Venezuela has already bought fighter jets, submarines and guns from Russia. And add to the equation Venezuela’s burgeoning friendship with Iran, another bete noire for the Americans.

Chavez seems to enjoy goading the Bush administration almost for the fun of it. He has variously called President George W. Bush a donkey, a drunk, and in a U.N. speech, the Devil.”

The naval exercises with Russia will not be as easy for Washington to brush off as the name-calling.

Relations between Washington and Moscow are tense because of Russia’s intervention in Georgia in August. The Kremlin was angered by the United States’ sending a naval flotilla to the Black Sea to show support for Georgia.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev even asked how Washington would feel if Russian sent aid vessels to the Caribbean.

During the Cold War, Russian had a substantial military presence in Cuba and was involved behind the scenes in the Central American wars of the 1980s. With the Soviet Union’s collapse, all that ended.

But Russian officials have made it clear recently that Moscow is ready to play a role on the world stage again.

Meanwhile the United States’ Fourth Fleet this year began patrolling Latin American waters for the first time in 50 years, a move that Chavez denounced but that has also concerned moderate countries such as Brazil.

The Venezuela-Russia exercises are due to take place days after the U.S. presidential election - an event that will complicate any response from Washington and at the same time divert world attention.

At the security checkpoint on the way in to Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili’s chancellery building, two small posters are displayed.    

“Stop Russia,” says the first. The second is a quotation from British World War Two leader Winston Churchill: “Never, never, never give up.”

Together, they sum up a national mood of grim defiance in Georgia after a short, disastrous war with Russia, followed by the loss of two provinces that have been outside Tbilisi’s control since the early 1990s but have now cemented their split by getting Moscow to recognise them as independent states under its protection.

Sitting in front of a row of Georgian and European Union  flags,  Saakashvili projects remarkable energy for a man under intense strain, three weeks into a national crisis. ”The first couple of days he didn’t sleep, we were all worried about him,” says a staffer in the presidential building. 

For several nights this week he held late-night sessions with Western reporters, sometimes finishing as late as 3 a.m., as he sought to gain the upper hand in the media war that has run parallel to the conflict on the ground with Russia.

“Russia clearly intended this as a blatant challenge to world order. It’s now up to all of us to roll Russian aggression back,” he told Reuters in an interview that started at 20 minutes after midnight.

Saakashvili has lost weight, says a Western observer who knows him well, but his face shows barely a trace of the sleepless nights.  

He seems energised by a loud chorus of Western support for Georgia after Russia’s recognition of breakaway South Ossetia and Abkhazia – a contrast with the start of the conflict, when some Western officials privately suggested his own hot-headedness was at least partly to blame for triggering Russia’s invasion.

Is Saakashvili’s leadership secure? For now, at least, the mood of national solidarity should make him immune to any domestic political challenge, analysts say. 

Longer-term, the prospects are less certain. Saakashvili is pinning his hopes on Georgian entry to NATO, which would commit the alliance to come to its defence if it were attacked. But many analysts believe NATO, after this crisis, is not ready to make that promise and risk being drawn into its own war with Russia.

The opposition has in effect called a moratorium on criticising the leadership. ”But the time will come when the Georgian society will start to ask them questions about what has happened to our country,” said an opposition leader, Tina Khidasheli.

Privately some Georgians blame Saakashvili for leading them into their current debacle, and the public mood is subdued and tired. ”Everyone is depressed, no one feels like working,” says a young man, Alex. A dancer at Tbilisi’s Nabadi folk theatre, Tako Svanidze, says no one is turning up to performances: ”No one has time for singing and dancing…People aren’t in the mood.” 

On Thursday Georgians
flocked to their Orthodox churches to pray for the country on a major religious festival, the Assumption of the Virgin Mary.      

 ”We believe the mother of Christ will save the whole of Georgia,” said Nino Dzigua, a young woman in an orange headscarf. 

Did she think that Western support could rescue the country? 

“Only God,” she replied. 

Tension is mounting around the Black Sea following Russia’s recognition of two Georgian regions, South Ossetia and Abkhazia, as independent states.  

Russia said its navy was monitoring ”the build-up of NATO forces in the Black Sea area” as the U.S. Navy shipped humanitarian supplies to Georgia on Wednesday.

In a move that could further aggravate Russia, Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko said he wanted to discuss charging Russia more for the lease of a naval base in the Crimean port of Sevastopol, which is part of Ukraine.   

Ukrainian leaders say they fear they might be next on Russia’s hit list, a concern echoed by French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner. He told France’s Europe 1 radio: ”I repeat that it is very dangerous, and there are other objectives that one can suppose are objectives for Russia, in particular the Crimea, Ukraine and Moldova.”

Analysts say the Crimea region, in southern Ukraine, could be used by Russia to destabilise Ukraine. Not only does it host Russia’s Black Sea fleet, but the majority of people living there are ethnic Russians.                                                            

It would not be the first time Crimea has been at the heart of a war. The territory has been conquered many times and has been controlled by people including Goths, Huns, Bulgars and Greeks. 

The Russian Empire lost the Crimean War of 1854-1856 against an alliance of France, Britain, the Kingdom of Sardinia and the Ottoman Empire but the war is regarded by many Russians as a glorious defeat.

Crimea was again the scene of heavy fighting during World War Two, when it was occupied by Nazi Germany and Sevastopol was under siege from October 1941 until it succumbed in July 1942. Its resistance is regarded by many Russians as a heroic struggle against the odds.

Eighteenth-century Empress Catherine the Great built the neo-classical port at Sevastopol to house the Russian Navy after taking decades to conquer the Crimean region. The pride and joy of the Russian military, the region was granted to the Ukrainian Soviet Republic in 1954. After the Soviet Union fell, Moscow was forced to lease the harbour space under a deal that expires in 2017. 

Could this region — a popular holiday destination because of its green mountains, deep-blue sea and sunny climate — really be at the heart of a new war as Ukraine seeks membership of NATO and the European Union?

Ukrainian politicians say Russia’s actions in Georgia are unacceptable and they fear the worst. ”What has happened is a threat to everyone, not just for one country. Any nation could be next, any country. When we allow someone to ignore the fundamental right of territorial integrity, we put into doubt the existence of any country,” Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko said on Wednesday.  

Moscow says Ukrainian politicians are trying to antagonise Moscow. Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Grigory Karasin accused Kiev on Wednesday of stirring tensions and hinted that some politicians wanted to trigger a tough response from Moscow to boost their own standing. ”This is a cynical and dangerous game,” he said.  

Political analysts acknowledge tensions are running high but say there is good cause to hope conflict can be avoided. ”There is a reason to be wary in the short-term future, there is a threat in that Ukraine is similar to Georgia in terms of what has happened in recent years,” said one analyst, Oleksander Dergachev. ”But I find it difficult to think that the threat posed is a military one. Russia relies on the fact that it has more of an influence over Ukraine economically.”
       

The people of South Ossetia and Abkhazia were celebrating on Tuesday after Russian President Dmitry Medvedev signed a decree recognising the independence of the two regions. 

Western leaders responded with harsh words. U.S. President George W. Bush said it increased world tensions and Britain called for “the widest possible coalition against Russian aggression in Georgia,” where the two regions lie. 

But what can the West do to punish Russia or discourage it from any similar acts in the future? 

Military action has never been a realistic option since Russia sent tanks and troops to halt Georgia’s assault on South Ossetia. United Nations sanctions are also out of the question because Russia ihas the right of veto on the U.N. Security Council.

Major powers are also reluctant to do anything that might encourage Moscow to withdraw its help with U.N. sanctions against Iran over its nuclear programme and transit support for NATO forces in Afghanistan. 

Retaliation could involve Russian membership of the big international clubs: excluding Russia from the Group of Eight (G8) top industrial democracies or blocking its bid to join the World Trade Organization (WTO). 

But any action will be carried out with the nagging thought at the back of Western leaders’ minds - Moscow is no longer the economic basket-case of Soviet times and, riding a tide of petrodollars from soaring oil prices, western Europe depends on Russian oil and gas.

Russian leaders have signalled they are not troubled by the Western reaction, partly because the Kremlin sees strong public support at home for its actions in Georgia and in the stand-off with the West, and partly because of the wealth it now has from its natural resources.

When NATO suspended activities with Russia, Moscow responded with a shrug of the shoulders, saying it was also freezing activities with the defence alliance. Moscow also plans to halt visits by senior NATO officials and joint military exercises with the alliance.

The European Union could, in theory, send in peacekeepers or break off talks with Russia over a wide-ranging strategic partnership, or even announce economic sanctions such as curbing existing trade arrangements. Moscow has shown no sign of concern over this - such moves would risk Moscow cutting energy supplies to Europe.

“Nothing scares us, including the prospect of a Cold War, but we don’t want it,” Medvedev said on Monday. “In this situation, everything depends on the position of our partners.”            

Does Russia have the upper hand? Perhaps. But despite the talk about a Cold War, there are also reasons to believe it is not about to start and that conflict can be contained.

Moscow’s confidence and strength rests largely on high prices for energy and other natural resources and it is still a far cry from the military force it was in Soviet times. Moscow also no longer controls large swathes of eastern and central Europe and no longer has the huge influence it once enjoyed in other parts of the world. The Kremlin is also likely to be concerned about investment flows into Russia, which ratings agency Fitch says could be affected by the rising tensions. 

Mikhail Kasyanov, a former Russian prime minister turned Kremlin opponent, was quoted by Interfax news agency as saying Moscow’s decision was “one more step towards the self-isolation of the Russian Federation from the international community.”

But Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov believes isolation is not looming for Russia: ”I don’t believe this should really be a doomsday scenario. I believe common sense should prevail.” 

Russia’s bear-paw swipe at Georgia has got many people drawing comparisons with the Cold War, but personally I like to look for parallels in the 19th century.

At the time the faultlines between Russian and British imperial interests ran from the Balkans through the Crimea and the Caucasus to Central Asia and Afghanistan. That is remarkably similar to some of the faultlines creating upheavals today.  

Angered by western support for the independence of Kosovo in the Balkans, Russia is at loggerheads with NATO over Georgia in the Caucasus.  The row over Georgia has raised fears Russia may halt vital transit of NATO cargoes to Afghanistan – though this has been denied by Moscow – threatening the U.S.-led campaign against al Qaeda and the Taliban. Such is the geographical sweep of the world’s problems, that British commentator Simon Jenkins even suggested we may be drifting towards a new global war.

So what are the lessons of history? And what can we learn about what Russia’s motives really are in the current crisis?

According to Lawrence James’s history of the British Raj, the Russians in the 19th century were experts at applying in war and diplomacy a technique adapted from a chess manoeuvre known as a “Maskirovka”. This aims to deceive your opponent into expecting an attack in one place in order to gain strategic advantage elsewhere. In particular, he says, they tried to trick the British into fearing a Russian invasion of India to divert their attention so that Russia itself could focus on securing its European flank.

The Russians considered this gambit during the Crimean war when Britain and its allies fought Russia for control of the Black Sea (the scene of tensions today between U.S. and Russian ships off the Georgian coast) — eventually driving the Russians out of the port of Sebastopol in 1855 (now known as Sevastopol in Ukraine and leased to Moscow as the base of its Black Sea fleet).  It seems history has a way of repeating itself when it comes to choosing its faultlines. 

They tried it 20 years later, prompting Britain to invade Afghanistan in 1878 to secure a buffer state between Russia and India. It was Britain’s second attempt to take over Afghanistan and like its earlier invasion from British India ended in humiliation and defeat. But then history has repeated itself so often when it comes to unsuccessful invasions of Afghanistan that it’s a wonder that any foreign army would choose to set foot in the country ever again.

Reading between the lines of James’s account, it’s easy to reach the conclusion that western powers — from the old British empire to the United States of today – have so consistently underestimated Russia’s sense of vulnerability on its European flank that they have misread the signals on other fronts to the point of making foolish counter-moves of their own. Indeed James says one of the few rulers of British India not to have fallen for Maskirovka adopted a policy of “masterly inactivity”.

Perhaps time to take a long hard look at what matters to Russia, and to work out what it is trying to achieve, rather than interpreting its every move as a potential step towards a new Cold War?

When thousands in the streets of the Ukrainian capital Kiev and the Georgian capital Tbilisi overthrew Soviet-style rulers, many felt warm in the embrace of the West.

Western support for the opposition — open and behind the scenes –  helped many people overcome fear of Soviet-style reprisals to stand for days outside Georgia’s parliament in 2003 or to pitch orange tents on Kiev’s main thoroughfare in late 2004, providing a lasting image of “people power” overthrowing a stale leadership.

Washington, or at least organisations with close political ties with the Bush administration, had courted opposition parties in both countries, coaching in the methods of democracy or securing “regime-change” as they sought to end the rules of President Leonid Kuchma and Georgian leader Eduard Shevardnadze. 

But the new leaders, and their teams, soon found that the attentions of an adoring West didn’t last for long. Ukraine’s team of President Viktor Yushchenko and Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko soon fell apart.                                                                                                                                                                             The West grew tired of the constant bickering of the Ukrainian leaders, unable to agree on almost any policy, while a resurgent pro-Russian Viktor Yanukovich, who lost a rerun of the presidential election, encouraged unity in his own party and rose in popularity.

In Georgia, Saakashvili cracked down on post-election protests last year and now some blame him for taking Tbilisi into a war it could never win.  

The war in South Ossetia has frightened Ukraine. Yushchenko was quick to turn to the United States, saying he considered “U.S. support for Ukraine to be very important”.

But has the West given up? Ukraine and Georgia have been promised membership of NATO one day but the alliance decided at a summit in April not to give them a road map to membership.

Tomas Valasek, director of foreign policy and defence at the Centre for European Reform, said Georgia could be ruled out of NATO membership for the time being. ”There will be allies who will say that this government is not creating stability, if anything it has done the exact opposite … you don’t want an ally in NATO that has a propensity to act the way that Saakashvili did.”

 But it could go either way for Ukraine.

“You could argue that no one will go to war over Ukraine, and then it will be difficult to invite Ukraine into NATO,” Valasek said. “Or the allies might decide this — that it is important that we prevent Russia acting irresponsibly in the neighbourhood, and it is important to send a message to say we will not be discouraged by what happened in Georgia.”

It is hard not to view Poland’s decision to accept the U.S. missile shield in the context of tensions over Georgia - a point Russia, which loathes the project, was quick to make.

And although Warsaw and Washington dismiss the idea and diplomats say a compromise on the long-negotiated deal was hammered out before Russia’s intervention in the Caucasus, there is no smoke without fire.

The fact is that most Poles and other central Europeans reacted with alarm to the Russian invasion of Georgia because it revived often bitter memories of the iron-fisted Soviet rule of the region after World War Two.

Since the events in Georgia, polls clearly show a turnaround in public opinion in Poland from apprehension to enthusiasm for the shield.

But contrary to Moscow’s rhetoric that the 10 interceptors are seen here as a weapon against Russia, the swing in opinion reflects a shattering of a sense of security Poles enjoyed since joining the European Union and NATO in the past decade.

Suddenly close ties with the world’s largest superpower have gained in value and agreeing to host U.S. missile installations on Polish soil has become like buying an extra insurance policy in uncertain times.

Whether the rockets can indeed fly and intercept future Iranian missiles, as many experts doubt, seems to be of secondary importance to the Poles.

“I think Poland needs the shield - common sense dictates Poland needs to be closely linked with the United States,” said Jerzy Peszek, 61, an IT worker in Warsaw.

“The shield is a good decision in the context of the current global political situation, where Russia attacks Georgia,” echoed Emilia Pichta, 22, a student. “It can happen to us, too.”

For the Polish government such a mood is a godsend, admittedly with “made in Russia” printed all over it.

The government had bargained hard with the Americans and raised expectations that Poland would receive billions in return for hosting the shield.

The events in Georgia allowed Prime Minister Tusk to quietly abandon this approach and go back to the big-picture strategic view that finds favour with a majority of his countrymen.