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Abstract
The Russia–Georgia war of August 2008 re-established the saliency of hard power in the Black Sea region. Yet security realities have turned out far differently than most at the time expected. NATO enlargement is off the table, but NATO’s partnerships – not least of all with Georgia – are far from moribund. Russia’s discontent with the international order is overshadowed by its despondency about itself. Its radical defence reform has produced turmoil rather than coherence. Its geopolitical advances have produced few geopolitical advantages. Georgia and Ukraine each retain the capacity to dishearten supporters and exasperate antagonists. The loss of Abkhazia and South Osetia has neither weakened Georgia nor its president. Ukraine’s pre-emptive concessions to Russia have neither diminished Russian pressure nor Ukraine’s determination to resist it. Although Turkey remains a determinant regional actor, it is more preoccupied with Europe, the Mediterranean, the Middle East and its own domestic problems than with its northern neighbourhood. For all this, the region remains defined by asymmetry of interest, capacity and perception – and distrust. It would be unwise to expect predictability and prudent to expect the unexpected.
Notes
1. At the Valdai Club lunch in September 2008 President Medvedev stated that the Russia-Georgia war had changed the situation in the region and the world. The West had long been ‘warned’ that it ‘did not belong’ in ‘post-Soviet space’. Had Georgia been granted MAP, ‘I would not have hesitated for a second to take the decision I took’. If Ukraine joined NATO, ‘would this make NATO stronger or the planet safer’?
2. As a CSRC colleague and I wrote in April 1999, ‘[t]he most serious consequence of the Kosovo crisis is likely to be the legitimisation of anti-Western perspectives which Russia’s moderates have thus far kept under control…. In the worst, but far from implausible case that an anti-Western leadership comes to power [after Yeltsin], four axes of breakout would arouse interest: (1) ‘reviving Russia’ by a ‘strong’, regulated economic policy and by a stronger and larger ‘Slavic core’ (to Ukraine’s possible peril); (2) a serious long-term commitment to revive Russia’s military power; (3) the Balkans, where ‘intelligence struggle’ will be enlisted to undermine Western allies and clients and (4) a search for ‘strategic partnerships’ with India, China and possibly Arab countries and Iran’. Russian and Ukrainian Perceptions of Events in Yugoslavia, Conflict Studies Research Centre, RMA Sandhurst, 25 April 1999.
3. Along similar lines, Lieutenant General Leonid Ivashov, then Head of the MOD’s International Cooperation Directorate, told the Russian channel NTV, ‘[i]f the world community swallows this large-scale aggression, this barbarity, then it is today difficult to say who will be next, but there will be a state that is going to be next in line without fail’.
4. Since June 2009, the OSCE Corfu Process under the chairmanship of Greece has sought to institutionalise the dialogue with Russia on European security architecture. But it has done so on the basis of three principles at variance with Russia’s proposals: the OSCE, as an inclusive body of 56 states, should remain the framework for this dialogue; the dialogue should cover all aspects of security, including human rights, democracy and the rule of law; the dialogue must not presuppose a conclusion or lead a priori to a ‘binding’ security treaty.
5. Outside the annual summits, the NRC convenes bi-annually at the level of Foreign and Defence Ministers and Chiefs of General Staff and meets monthly at the level of ambassadors and military representatives.
6. NATO Summit Declaration, 20 November 2010, para 23 (Press Release PR/CP(2010)0155).
7. Strategic Concept For the Defence and Security of The Members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation Adopted by Heads of State and Government in Lisbon: Active Engagement, Modern Defence, para 34.
8. Ibid., listed as one of 13 bullet points on measures ‘to deter and defend against any threat to the safety and security of our populations’, para 19.
9. Until the end of 2009, the NRC had four Working Groups (Principal Subordinate Committees): peacekeeping, proliferation, terrorism, theatre missile defence and airspace management. On 4 December, the decision was made to enlarge them to six and create two additional Ad-Hoc Working Groups.
10. When Deputy Chief of the General Staff, Colonel General Anatoliy Nogovitsyn was asked at the Valdai Club on 13 September 2008 to explain how medium-range interceptors and radars cited in Poland and the Czech Republic could possibly intercept Russian ICBMs on their polar trajectory, he replied that ‘it is obvious to any thinking person that the only purpose of these weapons is to undermine the Russian strategic deterrent and the international arms control regime’.
11. ‘Clearly there are concerns, and I’ve heard them expressed not only here in Poland but in other countries in the region’. ‘I officially will not confirm or deny the deployment of nuclear weapons anywhere, neither within NATO countries nor anywhere else in the region’, Agence France Presse, 11 February Citation2011.
12. The decisive shift in direction occurred in 2003 with a major reshuffling of power ministries (March) and adoption of an MOD-drafted defence reform (July). The most immediate beneficiary of these changes was not the Armed Forces but the FSB, whose budget and personnel were tripled almost overnight (albeit in good part through the amalgamation of previously separate security structures).
13. According to Jacob Kipp of FMSO, a core aim of such warfare is to achieve ‘mastery of time in a combat situation’, 9.
14. Shlykov, op. cit.
15. As of 1 January 2008, force levels stood at 355,300 officers, 140,000 warrant officers and 623,500 sergeants and soldiers. Shlykov, op. cit.
16. Thus, Colonel-General (ret’d) Leonid Ivashov, president of the Academy of Geopolitical Problems, claims that the reform is designed to boost Medvedev’s political rating on the eve of elections. With less room for argument, he has also stated that ‘[t]urning points like these in the life of the army are of a strategic nature and…should not be taken without academic study, without a simulation of this image of the armed forces or testing in individual units’, cited in Roger McDermott, ‘Gogol’s Nose and Reversing Russian Military Officer Downsizing’, Eurasia Defense Monitor [Washington, DC: Jamestown Foundation], 7 February 2011, [hereafter EDM].
17. Colonel-General (ret’d) Viktor Yesin, cited in Roger McDermott, ‘Moscow Lowers Expectations on Tactical Nuclear Breakthrough’, EDM, 3 May 2011.
18. According to Russia’s Ministry of Defence on 1 March 2011, the actual military presence is 1200 troops in South Osetia and 1300 in Abkhazia.
19. ‘Major role for European observers in Georgia under UN, OSCE mandate’ and ‘EU observers need no Russian permission to enter Abkhazia, South Ossetia’, SWB 9 September 2008.