The Great Debate

from The Great Debate UK:

Save Georgia’s Peace Mission

Lawrence Sheets is Caucasus Project Director of the International Crisis Group. The opinions expressed are his own.

The truce that ended last summer's war between Russia and Georgia may be more or less holding for now, but the structures keeping the peace are crumbling due to Russian pressure and Western acquiescence.

Last August, Moscow and Tbilisi fought a short but vicious war over South Ossetia, a region of less than 50,000 people that Moscow now recognizes as an independent state but which the rest of the world regards as part of Georgia. Intense diplomacy was crucial in ending the fighting, as European Union mediation, under the French Presidency, helped compel Russia to put its pen to a truce agreement.

Unfortunately, practically before the ink was dry on the document, Moscow was blatantly refusing to fulfil the terms of the ceasefire.

Not only has it refused to withdraw several thousand additional troops it sent into South Ossetia as well as Abkhazia -- another region Russia alone recognizes as independent -- it has also flatly refused access to international monitors. And in April, Russia announced it was sending even more troops to South Ossetia and Abkhazia, as if to flaunt its noncompliance with the Medvedev-Sarkozy agreement of August.

Now, Moscow has taken aim at the only major international organisation with a solid track record in Georgia, the 56-member Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). The OSCE has been in Georgia for more than 15 years: monitoring unstable areas in and around South Ossetia, promoting conflict resolution, supporting minority issues, helping lay the foundations for democracy and the rule of law, and criticizing electoral fraud. In South Ossetia it even facilitated economic rehabilitation projects between ethnic Georgians and Ossetians until the August war.

Last Month, OSCE member states met in Vienna to work on a Greek-sponsored compromise to keep the OSCE in Georgia, one of the final steps in thorny negotiations which have been going on since January. But Moscow shot down the Greek proposal, which had already been heavily amended to try to address Russian concerns, by preventing it from coming up for a vote.

NATO and Russia

By Gareth Evans, President, and Alain Délétroz Vice President (Europe) of the International Crisis Group. Any views expressed are the authors’ alone.

The biggest unresolved challenge facing the NATO countries’ leaders when they meet on the Rhine this week is how to manage the organization’s relationship with Russia. Nobody wants to relive the Cold War, but habits of mind from that era persist on both sides, continuing to influence behaviour and inhibiting the clean break from the past that would be in everyone’s interest.

Russia’s invasion of Georgian territory last year seemed to confirm every latent NATO fear about the aggressive resurgence of the beast-from-the-east which the organization was formed sixty years ago to counter. And it is hard to argue that Moscow’s response to the situation in South Ossetia was not an indefensible overreaction, whatever judgment one makes about President Saakashvili’s contribution to the course of events. But what was missing from nearly all the Western reaction was any thoughtful reflection on what its own leaders’ contribution might have been, over the years since the USSR collapsed, to Russia’s newly assertive posture.

It is not fully appreciated, even now, in most NATO capitals how strongly Moscow feels that the organisation’s expansion, deep into the former socialist camp and the former USSR itself, was a brutally insensitive and confrontational response to the quick and generous Soviet withdrawal from Eastern Germany and Central Europe. The West rightly argues that all new NATO members have joined freely, and certainly not under pressure from the U.S. or EU member states. But the vast majority of Russians see NATO as an offensive military alliance, bombing Belgrade in 1999 without UN Security Council approval and now trying to surround Russia in spite of promises made to Mikhail Gorbachev not to expand eastwards.

NATO has become an easy target for nationalists in Russia who want to buoy anti-Western sentiment and convince the population that they are facing a significant threat from outside – basically the same as that during the Cold War. It is unquestionably the case that in the present environment any new enlargement towards Russian borders, particularly to Ukraine and Georgia, will be universally perceived in Russia as an unfriendly act that will demand retaliation.

How can these tensions be defused in a way that will be constructive and forward-looking, but also acknowledge the political reality that neither NATO nor Russia will be very keen to fundamentally change its narrative of what has occurred so far? The best starting point, in our view, would be to acknowledge that the problem with NATO’s expansion was not so much that it extended to Russia’s borders, but that it stopped there.   The most helpful single step, accordingly, that NATO leaders could take at this Summit would be to make a very clear statement that NATO is an alliance of the free open for membership by all countries on the European continent, including Russia itself, and encouraging Moscow to seek membership at a time of its own choosing.

Making such an explicit public statement would have at least three positive consequences. It would place the ball in the Russian leadership’s court, forcing it to consider the offer seriously and articulate a response. It would ease tensions surrounding Ukraine and Georgia: possible NATO enlargement here could no longer be seen as inherently unfriendly act towards Russia if the door is open for Russia itself to join the alliance. And it would paint into a corner the most nationalist politicians in Russia who use NATO so flagrantly to undermine any serious move toward real democratization at home.

from Global News Journal:

Russia-Ukraine row: up close and personal

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.