Digest: Financial Times: Living with the Russian bear
Russia has, for the moment, more or less ended its assault on Georgia. Diplomacy, led by Nicolas Sarkozy, the French and current European Union president, has entered the arena to try to separate and reconcile the combatants, But Vladimir Putin, re-emerging as Russia’s real leader over the past week, has achieved nearly all of Moscow’s war aims, in the face of a feeble western response. Russia looks in no mood to negotiate anything. This is going to be a difficult crisis to manage.
Russia has seized full control of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, the two separatist enclaves it sponsors on Georgian territory. It has damaged and humiliated the US- and Israeli-trained Georgian army, and re-established its writ in the Caucasus. The likelihood of Nato now embracing Georgia and Ukraine - and committing to defend them - has receded, despite Tuesday’s assertion by Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, its general secretary, that the alliance’s pledge to admit them eventually still stands.
Mr Sarkozy arrived in Moscow with a plan for a truce, Russian commitment to Georgia’s territorial integrity, a return to each side’s positions before Georgia attacked the South Ossetian capital last week, and a peacekeeping force under the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE).
Russia pre-empted him on the ceasefire but is unlikely to give too much on the rest. Moscow argues that just as the west acted to stop ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, and eventually separated the province from Serbia, so Russia acted to protect its nationals and peacekeepers in South Ossetia from “genocide”. Unlike in Kosovo, the world has, so far, seen no proof of these alleged massacres. The Russian peacekeepers, moreover, acted more as fireraisers than as firefighters.
But, absurd though Moscow’s mimetic argument is, the west should call its bluff. If Russia’s real worry is the humanitarian situation in the enclaves, an OSCE peacekeeping mission should present it with no problem. The future of the disputed territories must be decided by negotiation, not by land-grabs.
The EU and the US have limited leverage with Russia; giving Georgia’s erratic leadership an IOU on Nato entry has not increased it. Yet the west must engage with Moscow and robustly test its intentions. Russia’s membership of the G8, its wish for strategic partnership with Nato and the EU and entry to the World Trade Organisation - all part of its self-image as a world power - should be made conditional on its behaving as a responsible power. That is the least that anxious former Soviet vassals can expect.
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