A study of the failures of Russian foreign policy in Georgia

The history of Georgia since independence can serve as a demonstration of every Russian method of exercising power in the Near Abroad.[1] Georgia has been a victim of Russian-backed separatism, misinformation campaigns, invasion, and partial occupation. Despite this, Georgia proper has remained outside of the Russian sphere. This serves as the first puzzle of modern Georgia: why have all Russian methods of influence exertion failed, while countries have stayed in the Russian sphere with far less meddling from Russia?

It is easy to divide Georgia since independence into two periods, one before the Rose Revolution in late 2003 and one after. The Russian view of the Rose Revolution is as a pro-western foreign-planned coup.[2] This misses a very important point, which is that Georgia was not particularly pro-Russian on the eve of the revolution in 2003, and therefore Russian foreign policy in Georgia must have failed without any alleged western coup.

Directly after the fall of the Soviet Union the former Soviet republics formed the CIS (Commonwealth of Independent States), which all of the former Soviet republics have been members of or deeply involved with, with the exception of the three Baltic states. The role and purpose of the CIS is to facilitate trade and political cooperation between member states. With Russia as the largest member in area, population, and economy and its great interests in seeing the old Soviet space stand united, it is easy to see the CIS as a Russian tool to maintain influence through economic cooperation. In that regard the CIS has largely failed, however, with mostly ceremonial and nominal cooperation agreements.[3] As Georgia never joined the later organizations of the CSTO (Collective Security Treaty Organization) or the EEU (Eurasian Economic Union) this CIS was the only official link Georgia had to the Russian sphere. Georgia did not, however, join the CIS initially.

Map of Georgia with the breakaway republics shaded darker (image credit BBC news)

The poor post-Soviet Russia failed to influence Georgia through trade, and instead exploited the opportunities presented by Georgia’s internal armed struggles. In the years 1991-1993, three wars were ongoing almost simultaneously in Georgia, all of them with a degree of Russian involvement. Two of these wars were the independence struggles of the Abkhaz and Ossetian peoples against the Georgian government. Ossetian rebels fought the newly established national guard in a slow struggle to control the South-Ossetian region. There was significant support for the South-Ossetian rebels in the Russian parliament, and Russian troops and helicopters fired on Georgian forces on multiple occasions.[4]

Less than two months after the end of the war in South-Ossetia, hostilities broke out in Abkhazia. The war in Abkhazia was a similar story to that in South-Ossetia, but with a larger separatist population and a more prepared Georgian army. The Russian parliament condemned Abkhazia, and as with South-Ossetia the Russian army sporadically clashed with Georgian forces. A critical difference between Abkhazia and South-Ossetia was that the Abkhaz people may not have been the majority of the population in Abkhazia prior to the war. As the war ended in a Georgian defeat, 250 000 Georgians, nearly half of the territory’s population, fled for Georgia.[5] The two separatist wars left hundreds of thousands of Georgians homeless, and internally displaced people are still more than 8% of the country’s population.[6]

While parts of the Georgian army fought in South-Ossetia, the Georgian military overthrew the government of the democratically elected president Zviad Gamsakhurdia. Civilian power was then handed over by the military to the former leader of Soviet Georgia and last foreign minister of the USSR, Eduard Shevardnadze. Though the Russian government supported Shevardnadze, the coup was made by the army leadership without any known Russian influence. When Gamsakhurdia returned to take power by staging a revolt in western Georgia, approximately two thousand Russian soldiers intervened with the stated objective of “protecting the railroads” and defeated Gamsakhurdia.[7]

First president of independent Georgia Zviad Gamsakhurdia. He would mysteriously die during the civil war in 1993. (image credit Georgian Journal)

The Russian military ended up supporting both the separatist republics and the military council in Georgia that fought them. This was the result of a strategic and political disagreement between communist and nationalist Russian parliamentarians on one side, and president Boris Yeltsin with his liberal and capitalist reformers on the other. As the Abkhaz war was ending, president Boris Yeltsin committed a coup against his own parliament after a tense political standoff. The Russian parliament had attempted to impeach Yeltsin, and their preferred president was the vice president Alexander Rutskoy, who had threatened direct intervention in South Ossetia.[4] While the constitutional crisis in 1993 was caused by a long-standing conflict between Yeltsin and remnants of Soviet power, among other things it ended the strategic ambiguity surrounding Russian policy in Georgia.

A possible answer to the opening question emerges here: the Russian methods of exerting influence are often internally contradictory, leaving neither side in the conflict they partake in pleased. Abkhazia, while having received support from Russia during the war, suffered under an economic blockade imposed by the CIS, Russia included, in the years following.[8] The Russian forces and weapons in Abkhazia soured relations with Georgia, and the blockade that attempted to smooth over relations with Georgia soured relations with Abkhazia.

Despite owing his power in part to Russian military force, Shevardnadze was by no means a puppet of Yeltsin’s Russia. This was made abundantly clear with Shevardnadze’s preference for defense cooperation with NATO rather than Russia. While Georgia signed on to the Collective Security Treaty (CST, the predecessor to the CSTO) in 1994, the country did not re-sign the treaty when it expired in 1999. Indeed, Georgia’s cooperation with NATO also had its humble beginnings in 1994, when Georgia joined NATO’s Partnership for Peace program.[9]

Two failures of Russian policy helped influence Georgia’s and Shevardnadze’s decision to begin pivoting away from Russian defense cooperation and towards the west and NATO. The first reason is that Russia had proved in the case of the war between Armenia and Azerbaijan, both signatories to the CST, that Russia is not capable of defending its members nor capable of mediating in a war between its own allies.[10] The second reason is that Shevardnadze appears to have believed that Russia was the most credible foreign threat against Georgia.[11]

While Shevardnadze’s Georgia was abandoning Russian military cooperation in the late 1990s, Russia was the one abandoning economic partnership with Georgia. After the end of the Abkhaz war and the constitutional crisis in Russia, Shevardnadze joined the CIS, something president Gamsakhurdia previously had avoided. This high point in post-Soviet Russo-Georgian relations was seemingly not meant to last with Yeltsin’s presidency nearing its end, and the old KGB agent and war hawk Vladimir Putin silently chosen for the presidency in late 1999. In the year 2000 Russia imposed a visa regime on Georgia, the first restriction of free travel within the CIS in its history.[12]

When the Rose Revolution happened in 2003 it was not primarily over concerns about Russian influence. Eduard Shevardnadze had, with a nine-year break in the middle, ruled Georgia since 1972. His attempts to silence opposition, silence independent media combined with his election rigging and general apathy towards corruption made the people choose to act.[13] The revolution was followed by the election of Mikheil Saakashvili with broad popular support, and his further push for western integration and NATO membership.

Crowds marching during the Rose Revolution (wikimedia commons)

Russian president Vladimir Putin was not pleased with the potential expansion of NATO into the Caucasus. At the Munich security conference in 2007 he spoke out against NATO expansion in eastern Europe, claiming it was a breach of oral assurances given to Gorbachev shortly before the end of the Warsaw Pact that NATO would not expand into eastern Europe.[14] In March of 2008 Russia lifted the CIS sanctions on the breakaway republics of Abkhazia and South-Ossetia, and almost immediately after Russian investment and aid flooded into the republics.[15] In other words, Putin at last chose the separatists over Georgia.

In April 2008 Georgia attended its first NATO summit in Bucharest, where the organization pledged to accept Georgian membership, should the country fulfill the necessary criteria.[9] This both confirmed Russian fears and seemed to bolster Georgia. Russia was massing troops around Georgia and in both of the separatist republics, while Georgia assembled their forces in Gori, close to the South-Ossetian capital of Tskhinvali.

The Russo-Georgian war began on the 7^th of August, and both sides maintain that the other fired first. The first maneuver of the war was a Georgian offensive against the South-Ossetian capital Tskhinvali. A Russian counteroffensive ended the war before the end of the 12^th. The motives of the Georgian offensive are in some dispute, with Georgian claims of self-defense brought into question by the amount of preparation in Gori.[16]

After the ceasefire agreement of August 12^th, the Russian army did not halt within the borders of the separatist republics, and instead occupied parts of Georgia proper. Russian forces occupied the cities of Gori, Poti, Senaki, and Zugdidi, and blocked Georgia’s main east to west highway and main port.[17] The Russian army did not move to take Tbilisi, and no intention was shown of overthrowing the Georgian government or permanently occupying the territories. The most direct consequence of the occupation was harming the Georgian economy, with the war potentially costing Georgia 2 billion euros in the long term.[18]

Map of Russian advances during the war (wikimedia commons)

Shortly after the end of the war, Russia formally recognized the independence of Abkhazia and South-Ossetia, to much jubilation in the breakaway republics and in spite of much condemnation by the west.[19] Russian forces remain in the separatist republics at the time of writing, and they are considered to be occupied territories of Russia. Georgia’s political response to the war was not to end or reconsider their NATO membership, but instead to leave the CIS.[20]

It may be impossible to track down a single unified reason for why Russian policy decisions failed to keep Georgia in the Russian sphere, but a part of the explanation is found in the Russian ambiguity on whether to support Georgia or the separatists. Russian support of the two separatist republics made Russia unpopular with Georgians, a sentiment that never fully disappeared even when Yeltsin chose Georgia. With Putin came a return to the separatist supporters in Russia. After the war Russia had won control over the two breakaway republics, but the war also made it inconceivable for an openly pro-Russian party to ever win a Georgian election again.[21]

For a moment there was a vaguely pro-Russian government in Georgia, when Shevardnadze in 1993 and 1994 signed himself and Georgia into both political, economic and defense cooperation with Russia. If Russian leadership had faith that Shevardnadze would stick by them simply because of their support of his coup, they were mistaken, but it was still not impossible to rule Georgia with a vaguely pro-Russian stance in the 90s.

The problem with sticking with Russia for a country like Georgia is that Russia does not have much to offer as an ally. In the year 2000 the EU had an economy nearly 30 times the size of Russia, making the offer to partake in a European market more tempting than to keep Russia as Georgia’s largest trading partner. If Russia only threatened countries leaving its sphere of influence it might serve as an incentive to stick with them, but the Russo-Belarusian “Milk war” (a trade war caused by Belarus’ refusal to recognize Abkhazia and South-Ossetia) proves that Russia does not shy away from pressuring and threatening even their closest allies.[22]

The Euromaidan revolution in Ukraine in 2013-2014 was caused by outrage that Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych chose a Russian trade deal over a European one, proving both that Russia does not accept countries deviating from its trade sphere and that ordinary people will choose to live in a country with better trade relations and a better economy, including if it means moving away from Russia.[23] For Georgia it simply did not make sense to keep Russia as their principal partner and ally. As the EU is becoming an increasingly more important trade partner for Central Asia, where over half of Putin’s formal allies remain, this may be an issue that Russia will have to face again.[24]