The Russia–Georgia War: Causes and Consequences

Nicolai N. Petro is professor of political science at the University of Rhode Island, US.

 

 

On the night of 7–8 August 2008, the Georgian army launched a full-scale assault to “restore constitutional order” to Georgia’s rebellious northern province of South Ossetia. After several days of intense fighting, this assault was rebuffed by the intervention of Russian military forces. Nearly a year has passed since these tragic events, yet there is still widespread disagreement over what happened, why it happened, and what lessons ought to be derived from the conflict.

 

For President Mikheil Saakashvili of Georgia, the Russian intervention was the pre-planned “cold-blooded murder of a small, free independent country by a ruthless big neighbor”.¹ It occurred because Russia simply could not tolerate an independent Georgia. For President Dmitry Medvedev of Russia, however, Georgia’s initial assault was a pre-planned act of genocide by Tbilisi against the people of South Ossetia. Medvedev’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, has called Saakashvili’s government a “criminal regime”, and argued that Russia had an obligation under international law to uphold the principles of human security and the responsibility to protect. The Western media, initially very supportive of Saakashvili, have become much more sceptical, as evidence of Georgian aggression mounts.²

 

Still, the conflict has cast a long shadow over Russia’s relations with the West, and before those relations can be reset, August’s war must be given some historical context, and popular explanations of why it erupted at that specific time must be examined. 

Georgian Nationalism

 While the crisis of last August is usually regarded as an international matter, a violation of state sovereignty, it can perhaps be better understood as an ethnic conflict among groups with long-standing grievances against one another. Specifically, it is fear of the resurgence of Georgian nationalism, which Mikheil Saakashvili carefully nurtured and brought to the boil, that lies at the heart of the separatist aspirations today of the Ossetians and Abkhaz.

 

The Ossetian people first joined the Russian Empire as an independent unit in the 1750s, but for convenience their lands were joined to the governorship of Tiflis (Tbilisi) some forty years later. Never entirely happy with this decision, in September 1990 South Ossetia declared its own autonomy within Georgia. On 11 December 1990, however, the Georgian Supreme Soviet abolished South Ossetia’s autonomy and, under the leadership of Zviad Gamsakhurdia, who would later become Georgia’s first elected president, launched early in 1991 a military assault to reassert Georgian control over the region.

 

Gamsakhurdia’s brief but turbulent presidency (May 1991–January 1992) is best remembered for his efforts to restore a “Georgia for Georgians” by scorning ethnic and religious minorities as “ungrateful guests in the Georgian home”.³ Ossetians, whom he once referred to as “Indo-European swine”, drew his particular wrath. Gamsakhurdia sought not merely to conquer South Ossetia, but to drive the Ossetians out of the territory. Such openly subversive minorities, as Gamsakhurdia put it, “should be chopped up, they should be burned out with a red-hot iron from the Georgian nation ... We will deal with all the traitors, hold all of them to proper account, and drive [out] all the evil enemies and non-Georgians!”⁴ As a result of the ethnically driven military campaigns initiated by Gamsakhurdia, of some one hundred thousand Ossetians living in Georgia proper, sixty thousand were displaced in fighting during the 1990s and fled mostly to Russia, while twenty-five thousand Georgians were expelled from South Ossetia. Georgia failed to gain control of the territory, much of which remained under the rule of the (unrecognised) government of South Ossetia. When President George H.W. Bush warned of “suicidal nationalism” in his famous speech in Kiev on 1 August 1991, he specifically had Gamsakhurdia in mind.

 

Gamsakhurdia’s policies and authoritarian style of governance generated internal Georgian opposition, and he was overthrown in an armed coup in December 1991, eventually being replaced as Georgia’s ruler by former Soviet foreign minister, Eduard Shevardnadze, in March 1992. Gamsakhurdia died in unclear circumstances on 31 December 2024 after attempting militarily to regain his presidency—a campaign that embroiled Georgia in civil war in 1993.

 

Despite their failure to subdue South Ossetia, Georgian leaders remain convinced that the territory rightfully belongs to them, and that those living on it should call themselves “Georgians”, or leave. One of Saakashvili’s first acts as president in 2004 was ceremoniously to rehabilitate Gamsakhurdia, hailing him as a “great statesman and patriot”. On 20 July 2004, he pledged that he was ready to renounce the Russian-brokered Dagomys Accords that ended the 1991–2 war between Georgia and South Ossetia if the Georgian flag did not fly over the latter’s capital, Tskhinvali. The war of August 2008 can be seen as a logical outcome of that pledge and the irredentist attitude it expresses.

 

That attitude is widespread among Georgians, including even Saakashvili’s political opponents. Nino Burjanadze, a woman who is a former speaker of parliament and is now widely regarded as Saakashvili’s most likely successor, has said: “No one can discuss in Georgia giving up Abkhazia and South Ossetia. It’s like someone saying to you ‘you’ll stay alive but I’ll cut off your hands and legs and cut your eyes out’.”⁵ Such sentiments have been echoed even by the spiritual leader of the Georgian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Ilya II: “The very names ‘South Ossetia’ and ‘North Ossetia’ did not exist before. They were invented by the communists ... Georgia will never accept the loss of its historical lands, which are the same for us as Orleans for the French, or Smolensk and Novgorod for Russia.”⁶ Thus, it is with the broad backing of the Georgian political elite that first Gamsakhurdia, and then Saakashvili, hoped to create a unified mini-empire by force. 

Why Invade Now? 

Although President Saakashvili finally admitted, in his testimony in November 2008 to the committee of inquiry set up by the Georgian parliament, that Georgia had indeed initiated the hostilities in August (albeit “unavoidably”), debate still rages over why Georgia attacked when it did. There are essentially two theories about this.

 

The first holds that Russian actions provoked a Georgian military reaction. According to this view, popular with the Bush administration and neo-conservative circles in the United States, a revanchist Russia was itching for an opportunity to punish Georgia for seeking to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), for allying with Washington, and for providing an alternative oil-transit route—the Baku–Tbilisi–Ceyhan pipeline—that cuts out Russia. Moscow therefore took the side of the separatists in South Ossetia and Abkhazia and prevented the Georgian government from extending its authority into those regions. Backed into a corner, Tbilisi felt its only option was to tear up the 1990s cease-fire agreements and reconquer the two territories militarily. While this argument resonates well with the theme of Russian aggression familiar from the Cold War, its plausibility rests on a highly selective reading of the evidence.

 

First, in order to portray Moscow as the aggressor, Russian peacekeeping efforts must be portrayed as insincere. For example, little attention is given to the provisions of the Dagomys Accords and of the subsequent truce covering Abkhazia, even though they confer extensive rights on Russia to maintain the peace, including the right to bar the entry into the conflict zones of military groups, to use force against violators of the cease-fires, and to pursue them beyond the conflict zones. Rarely is it mentioned that these are internationally sanctioned missions that, since 1992, have cost the lives of 117 Russian peacekeepers, and that by the beginning of 1998, “Russian peacekeeping forces representing the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), had helped some 50,000 to 70,000 displaced ethnic Georgians to return to Abkhazia”.⁷

 

Second, in order to portray Georgia as a helpless and guiltless democracy violated by Russia, the actual sequence of events is dismissed as irrelevant. Shortly after the fighting erupted, Richard Holbrooke, today President Barack Obama’s special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, wrote in a joint article: “Exactly what happened in South Ossetia last week is unclear.” Nevertheless, he knew, “without doubt”, that Russia was to blame.⁸ His sentiments were echoed by Robert Kagan, at the time an adviser to US presidential candidate, Senator John McCain: “The details of who did what to precipitate Russia’s war against Georgia are not very important.”⁹ If aggression is unimportant, then the incident can easily be spun as a Russian trap, and voilà, Georgian aggression becomes Russian aggression.

 

Third, for Georgia to be a victim, Russia’s actual unpreparedness for war is ignored. Thus, Saakashvili claimed that Russia invaded with eighty thousand servicemen and mercenaries and three thousand armoured vehicles, an invasion force “one hundred times more powerful” than the Georgian army. Internal NATO documents, however, paint a very different picture, saying that at the moment hostilities erupted the Georgians had some ten thousand men in the field and the Russians only eight thousand. Most damningly, however, US defence officials apparently confirmed that there was no obvious build-up of Russian forces along the border.¹⁰

 

Fourth, for allegations of Russian aggression to be at all plausible, Moscow’s appeals for a non-use-of-force agreement, and repeated calls for an internationally mandated cease-fire, both to the United Nations Security Council and to the Russia–NATO Council, must be filtered out. So must other steps by Moscow that would seem to contradict any premeditated attack plan, such as calling on the United States to help defuse the situation in the days leading up to the Georgian assault, inviting Georgia’s deputy foreign minister to Moscow for a meeting later that week, agreeing in the very week of the attack to an international peace conference in Berlin for 15 August, and finally, Putin’s seeking out George Bush in Beijing to inform him that Georgia had launched a military strike, and asking for help to reach the Georgian leadership, which had cut off contact with Moscow.

 

The second theory purporting to explain Tbilisi’s actions is that the timing was opportune for a premeditated attack by Georgia. According to this view, popular in Moscow, Saakashvili, frustrated by his inability to make progress in negotiations with the separatists in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, having seen his bid for NATO membership delayed, and facing the possibility of a less sympathetic political leadership in Washington after January 2009, decided on a quick solution while the world’s attention was diverted by the Beijing Olympics. The evidence for this theory can be broken down chronologically into evidence of Georgian premeditation in the years before 1 August 2008, and then during the first week of August 2008, as Tbilisi prepared to launch the attack of 7 August. 

A. Before 1 August 2024

• Upon becoming president in 2004, Saakashvili closed the Ergneti market in South Ossetia—a hub for trade in contraband goods that was the region’s major source of livelihood. In May of that year, he sent troops into the buffer zone with South Ossetia, and in August tried to seize it, but failed. A new cease-fire protocol supposed to lead to a comprehensive peace plan was signed by his prime minister, Zurab Zhvania, in November 2004, but after Zhvania’s suspicious death in February 2005, Saakashvili denounced the protocol and other peace agreements and expanded Georgia’s military budget thirty times, from 1.2 per cent of the country’s GDP to nearly 11 per cent. (US defence spending, by contrast, was just over 4 per cent.)¹¹ The number of men under arms increases by 46 per cent after 2005.

 

• Several senior Georgian officials, until recently close to Saakashvili, have described plans for an invasion as having been drawn up well before August and aimed at conquering both South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Irakli Okruashvili, who served as defence minister under Saakashvili from 2004 to 2006, but now lives in exile in France, reports that he and the president worked out military plans in 2005 to invade the two territories.¹² Another former close political ally, Erosi Kitsmarishvili, Georgia’s ambassador to Russia until he was dismissed in September 2008, confirms that Saakashvili intended the army to strike first against South Ossetia and then “within 24–36 hours” attack Abkhazia, thus explaining the split in Georgian forces between central and western Georgia.¹³

 

• In the spring 2007, Saakashvili set up a parallel pro-Georgian government in South Ossetia. He also repeatedly rejected calls for an agreement on the non-use of force over Abkhazia, most recently in meetings with Germany’s foreign minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in July 2008.¹⁴

 

• Lastly, at the beginning of July 2008, Georgia shut off the main water supplies to Tskhinvali, allowing only a sporadic supply to reach the South Ossetian capital up to the outbreak of hostilities in August. 

B. The First Week of August 2008

• After completing joint exercises with one thousand US troops at the end of July, Georgian forces did not return to their barracks as usual. Instead, the artillery brigade that would begin firing on Tskhinvali on 7 August was relocated to Gori, which would be the main staging ground for Georgian military operations.

 

• Hackers shut down South Ossetian news sites early on 5 August, two days before the Georgian assault. As soon as hostilities were launched, Georgia shut down access to all Russian-domain websites, the only source of alternative information available to most Georgians.

 

• In the very week of the attack, as its forces and artillery moved into position, Tbilisi repeatedly stated that it had no plans to attack and that there were no Georgian troop movements. Internal reports of the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) concluded that “Saakashvili lied 100 percent to all of us, the Europeans and the Americans”.¹⁵

 

• NATO sources briefed by the Georgian general staff in September 2008 noted in particular that the Georgian government never appealed to the United Nations or the OSCE through regular diplomatic channels, and took five days to appeal for NATO assistance. Instead, it focused its primary efforts on spinning the US media.¹⁶

 

Writing in the Nation, Mark Ames describes one telling incident in this media campaign—an “investor call” set up between fifty leading Western investment bank managers and Georgia’s prime minister, Lado Gurgenidze, just after the attack began. A New York hedge-fund manager told Ames:

 

Lado is a former banker himself, so he knew that by framing the conflict for the most influential bankers and analysts in New York, that these power bankers would then write up reports and go on CNBC and argue Lado Gurgenidze’s talking points. It was brilliant, and now you’re starting to see the American media shift its coverage from calling it Georgia invading Ossetian territory, to the new spin, that it’s Russian imperial aggression against tiny little Georgia.

 

Such a large conference call with so many busy people suggests significant planning, “These things aren’t set up on an hour’s notice,” the hedge-fund manager observed.¹⁷ 

Saakashvili’s Miscalculations 

A question that continues to puzzle many observers, however, is why a small country like Georgia would think it could succeed in attacking the much larger Russia. However, as Georgia’s deputy defence minister, Batu Kutelia, explained in a revealing interview with the Financial Times, Tbilisi had no contingency plans for a Russian military response. The Georgian army expected to be dealing only with the South Ossetian militia, which it heavily outgunned and outnumbered.¹⁸

 

Most importantly, though, Saakashvili appears to have interpreted the frequent pronouncements of Western sympathy and support for his regime as a green light to go ahead and solve his problems by force. According to the testimony of US State Department officials, the United States was in regular discussions with the Georgian leadership in the early days of August 2008, during which the latter repeatedly asked how Washington would respond if Tbilisi used military force against South Ossetia. Astonishingly, none of these discussions raised a red flag about Georgia’s intentions. Apparently, no one in the US government saw any connection between these persistent questions and the extraordinary pace of Georgia’s military build-up. Not surprisingly, as one US official later told the New York Times, “The Georgians figured it was better to ask forgiveness later, but not ask for permission first.”¹⁹

 

But while the State Department waffled, a clear go-ahead was apparently the message from Vice-President Dick Cheney’s office. David L Phillips, senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, told the Los Angeles Times that “Saakashvili’s buddies in the White House and the Office of the Vice President kept egging him on”.²⁰ Nixon Center president Dmitri Simes agrees that the message from the vice-president’s office, as well as from foreign-policy advisers like Richard Holbrooke, was that it was Saakashvili’s opposition to the Russians that mattered most to them.²¹ The more he could aggravate Moscow, the more the United States would support him. Coincidentally or otherwise, one of Cheney’s senior advisers, Joseph R. Wood, was in Tbilisi just days before the Georgians launched their attack.

 

Saakashvili might very well have concluded that, with world leaders attending the Beijing Olympics, it would be days before an effective response to a Georgian military operation in South Ossetia would be organised. A blitzkrieg that quickly replaced the political leadership in Tskhinvali would thus ultimately be welcomed by the West. As his former defence minister, Irakli Okruashvili, summarised the strategy, “Saakashvili’s offensive only aimed at taking Tskhinvali, because he thought the U.S. would block a Russian reaction through diplomatic channels.”²² Had this blitzkrieg succeeded, he might well have been right. The cease-fire resolution introduced by Russia six hours before it sent its own troops into the conflict, and which the United States and Britain opposed because Georgia did not yet control the situation on the ground, would have been supported. Had Russia then subsequently sought to reverse Georgian gains, it would have been universally condemned. 

After Georgia: Reset or Overload? 

The Western public’s reaction to Georgia’s attack has become a watershed in how Russians view the West. Russian pundits and politicians across the political spectrum saw the events of early August 2008 as a humanitarian crisis unleashed by naked Georgian aggression, and were outraged by the West’s reflex blaming of Moscow for supposedly starting the hostilities, and its indifference to the sufferings of the people of South Ossetia.

 

As influential foreign-policy analyst Fyodor Lukyanov put it,

 

Russia has been genuinely shocked by this foreign reaction and by the one-sided support that Georgian President Mikheil Saakasvili [sic] has received from the West, despite violating every conceivable humanitarian norm of civilized conduct. Moscow sees this as more than just a double standard, but as unabashed cynicism … Russia is now inclined not only to reject completely a path determined by Western values, but actually to deny that such values even exist.²³

 

Vyacheslav Nikonov, an analyst with close ties to the Kremlin, commented: “not only have we been denied condolences and support—but the West has responded with a firm promise to rearm the aggressor ... what would Washington have thought of us if Russia had responded to 9/11 by endeavouring to rearm Al Qaeda?”²⁴ Moral outrage at the West has been so complete that even long-time regime opponents, such as Yabloko party chairman Sergei Mitrokhin, human-rights activist Lev Ponomaryov, and jailed oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, voiced their support for Medvedev’s actions.

 

At the World Policy Forum at Evian, France, in October 2008, Medvedev reiterated that “transparency and equality in international relations” must become the basis for stability in global financial and security matters and, for the first time, laid out his vision of the principles that ought to undergird a new pan-European security treaty: conformity with the UN Charter; inadmissibility of the threat or use of force; truly equal security guarantees, based on respect for the security needs of others; the impermissibility of claims by any nation or group of nations to exclusive prerogatives for maintaining peace and stability; and the establishment of a common framework for what constitutes reasonable military development. Shortly afterwards, however, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov also issued the following warning to the West:

 

To us, the CIS space is not a “chessboard” for playing geopolitical games. It is a common civilizational area for all the people living here, one that keeps our historic and spiritual legacy alive. Our geography and economic interdependence give tangible competitive advantages to all of the Commonwealth countries … The response of some Western countries to the South Ossetia crisis … vividly illustrates a deficit of morality. Those incapable of siding with truth and justice simply cannot, no matter how hard they try, represent the whole of European civilization.²⁵

 

The Obama administration seems to be rethinking some of the assumptions previous US administrations had about Russia. But will these efforts “reset” (perezagruzka) relations or, as was embarrassingly miswritten on the button that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton presented to Lavrov in Geneva on 6 March 2009, “overload” (peregruzka) them?

 

Perhaps the greatest obstacle lies in acknowledging Russia’s desire for what Lavrov calls a “truly universal system of collective security in the Euro-Atlantic area”, where “the same rules of the game would apply to all”.²⁶ For Russia, such a treaty should stipulate that no single state or international organisation would have the exclusive job of maintaining regional stability—including Russia. Such a treaty would clearly impose constraints on NATO’s freedom of action that Washington might well find unacceptable. More broadly, Lavrov says that a new world order is needed that is perceived as fair everywhere and by everyone. This can be accomplished through the collective leadership of the key countries, led by the United States, but as a “respectful leader, first among equals, not the head of the unipolar world”.²⁷

 

What will Russia do if it does not get what it wants? According to Lavrov, it will have no choice but to “move aside”:

 

Under no circumstances will we let ourselves be drawn into confrontation. We will simply move aside, take up the position of a detached observer and continue to cooperate in a multilateral format if our bilateral relations with this or that country reach the freezing point. Something like this is now taking place in our relations with Britain.²⁸

 

Conducting affairs on the basis of strict reciprocity is not Russia’s preferred course, says Lavrov, but “if our marriages are to be made in heaven, sooner or later we will have to unite in the face of common challenges and threats on the sinful soil of our national interests”.²⁹

 

Of course, the question ultimately is whether there is any desire in the United States to be “married” to Russia. Heretofore, Washington has seemed quite content with a relationship of “one-night stands”, provided they are arranged at its convenience and with no strings attached. Perhaps the time has finally come for a sign of greater commitment, for the following reasons:

 

1. The West needs Russia more than it needs the West. A wealthy nation now, Russia is able to leverage financial interests in ways that directly affect Western concerns, such as lending a NATO member—Iceland—emergency funds to stabilise its banking system when other NATO members could not or would not do so. As Germany’s former chancellor, Gerhard Schroeder, bluntly puts it, “Russia has an Asian alternative, but Europe does not.”³⁰

 

2. Russia is vital to Europe’s energy security. Even if every pipeline is built, and every new oil well is drilled, the Western demand for Russian energy resources would still increase, not decrease.

 

3. Russia is vital to the war on terror. Recent US disagreements with Pakistan and China have proven once again that Russia is the one country always able and willing to provide reliable supply routes into Afghanistan, a country that is increasingly vital to America’s strategy in Central Asia.

 

4. Russia is also vital to dealing with the effects of global warming, and to negotiating fair access to Arctic resources. Moreover, by the end of the twenty-first century, Russia’s supply of fresh water is likely to become another crucial strategic resource. Consequently, it is not hard to understand why Russia championed the issues of global energy conservation at the 2006 G8 summit in St Petersburg.

 

5. Russia is popular around the globe. Contrary to the Bush administration’s claims that Russia was becoming more isolated after the conflict in Georgia, the truth is that standing up to the United States only helps Russia’s international image. Together with Brazil, China and India, Russia is generating growing support for a multipolar international system that seeks to put an end to US unilateralism. The crisis in Georgia has only accelerated this trend. As Kishore Mahbubani, Dean of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore, noted shortly after the Georgian war:

 

It is … critical for the west to learn the right lessons from Georgia. It needs to think strategically about the limited options it has. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, western thinkers assumed the west would never need to make geopolitical compromises. It could dictate terms. Now it must recognise reality. The combined western population in North America, the European Union and Australasia is 700m, about 10 per cent of the world’s population. The remaining 90 per cent have gone from being objects of world history to subjects. The Financial Times headline of August 18 2008 proclaimed: “West in united front over Georgia”. It should have read: “Rest of the world faults west on Georgia”. Why? A lack of strategic thinking.³¹

 

This lack of strategic thinking stems from the fact that so many Western analysts are still mired in stereotypes that prevent them from working together with Russia, even to secure common goals. Few people remember that Russia, as well as the United States, backed Saakashvili’s assumption of power, and that Vladimir Putin even helped the Georgian leader peacefully resolve the conflict in the separatist province of Ajaria in 2004. Had the West persisted in co-operating with Moscow, rather than challenging it, Abkhazia and South Ossetia would most likely still be part of Georgia today.

 

The lesson here is that policy differences with this or that Russian government can and should be managed pragmatically. To the extent that the Obama administration now appreciates this, there is indeed hope that US relations with Russia can be set on a new path.

 

 

Endnotes

 

 

1. Matea Gold, Tracy Wilkinson and Megan Stack, “Georgia President Mikheil Saakashvili Seems to Take Over TV News”, Los Angeles Times, 20 August 2008.

 

2. See, for example, Jon Swain, “Georgia Fired First Shot, Say UK Monitors”, Sunday Times (London), 9 November 2008, and C. J. Chivers and Ellen Barry, “Georgia Claims on Russia War Called into Question”, New York Times, 7 November 2008.

 

3. See Robert English, “Georgia: The Ignored History”, New York Review of Books, 6 November 2008.

 

4. Ibid.

 

5. Nick Coleman, “As Saakashvili Fights on, Georgia’s ‘Iron Lady’ Waits in Wings”, Agence France Presse, 24 September 2008.

 

6. Francois d’Alancon, “Ilia II: ‘There Will Be No Peace in Georgia without Justice’ ” (in French), La Croix (Paris), 19 September 2008.

 

7. United States Committee for Refugees and Immigrants, “US Committee for Refugees World Refugee Survey 2000—Georgia”, 1 June 2024 [http://www.unhcr.org/refworld/docid/3ae6a8d1f.html].

 

8. Richard Holbrooke and Ronald D. Asmus, “Black Sea Watershed”, Washington Post, 11 August 2008.

 

9. Robert Kagan, “Putin Makes His Move”, Washington Post, 11 August 2008.

 

10. Nikolas Busse, “Invasion? Provocation? NATO Seeks Answers” (in German), Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 6 September 2008.

 

11. Dmitry Litovkin, “Russian Paper Itemises NATO Military Aid to Georgia”, Izvestia (Moscow), 8 August 2008.

 

12. Brian Rohan, “Saakashvili ‘Planned S. Ossetia Invasion’: Ex-Minister”, Reuters, 14 September 2008.

 

13. See Jonathan Littell, “Travel Notebook from Georgia” (in French), Le Monde (Paris), 4 October 2008.

 

14. Deborah Cole, “Georgia Pokes Holes in German Peace Plan”, Agence France Press, 17 July 2008.

 

15. Ralf Beste, Uwe Klussmann, and Gabor Steingart, “Russia and the West: The Cold Peace”, Spiegel Online, 1 September 2024 [http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,575581,00.html].

 

16. Busse, “Invasion? Provocation?”

 

17. Mark Ames, “Getting Georgia’s War On”, Nation, 8 August 2008.

 

18. Jan Cienski, “Tbilisi Admits It Miscalculated Russian Reaction”, Financial Times (London), 22 August 2008.

 

19. Helen Cooper and Thom Shanker, “After Mixed US Messages, a War Erupted in Georgia”, New York Times, 13 August 2008.

 

20. See Gareth Porter, “Georgia War Rooted in US Self-Deceit on NATO”, Inter Press Service, 23 August 2008.

 

21. Andrei Shitov, “The USA Does Not Wish to Appear the Loser” (in Russian), Rossiiskaya Gazeta (Moscow), 18 August 2008.

 

22. Rohan, “Saakashvili ‘Planned S. Ossetia Invasion’ ”.

 

23. Fedor Lukyanov, “Seven Theses Prompted by the Russia–Georgia Conflict”, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 26 August 2008.

 

24. Vyacheslav Nikonov, “The War in the Caucasus: What Is the West Refusing to Understand?”, Izvestia (Moscow), 3 September 2008.

 

25. Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation, “Transcript of Speech by Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs Sergei Lavrov at MGIMO [University] on the Occasion of the New Academic Year”, Moscow, 1 September 2008.

 

26. Ibid.

 

27. Sergei Lavrov, interview by Charlie Rose, “A Discussion of US–Russian Relations with the Russian Foreign Minister”, The Charlie Rose Show, Public Broadcasting Service, 25 September 2008.

 

28. Sergei Lavrov, “Face to Face with America: Between Non-Confrontation and Convergence”, Profil (Moscow), no. 38, October 2008.

 

29. Sergei Lavrov, “A Roadmap to Cooperation”, Russia beyond the Headlines (Moscow), 28 May 2008.

 

30. “Spiegel Interview with Gerhard Schroeder: ‘Serious Mistakes by the West’ ”, Spiegel Online, 18 August 2024 [http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,572686,00.html].

 

31. Kishore Mahbubani, “The West Is Strategically Wrong on Georgia”, Financial Times (London), 20 August 2008.