How far will Putin go in Ukraine? Georgia may hold the answers

More than a week into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, much of the world has started to speculate on what can happen next, where is it heading, with some even suggesting a possible descent into an unthinkable nuclear conflict.

Russian President Vladimir Putin had, to begin with, said he had no intention of occupying Ukraine, and that Moscow’s intention was to dislodge the pro-Western Volodymyr Zelensky government in Kyiv.  To this end, during the ongoing fighting, he has intermittently even asked the Ukrainian army to revolt and force the government to surrender, saying that it would end the bloodshed and stall further destruction of the country. None is sure whether Putin means what he says.

It would be worthwhile to look back at another invasion, strangely ignored by the world media, involving Georgia that shares a common border to the south-west of Russia. And that happened just 14 years ago, in 2008, for almost identical reasons as now.

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In 2003, Georgia went through the so-called Rose revolution. Here, revolution did not mean a radical change in the social structure or anything of the kind. It was the replacement of a pro-Russian government by a pro-Western one.  It happened through mass demonstrations and continuous protests that forced the government of Eduard Shevardnadze to resign from office.

That it was backed by Western interests was never in doubt and became even more explicit soon after, when the new government of Mikheil Saakashvili announced Georgia’s intention to move closer to Europe and listed out moves in that direction including joining the European Union. At the Bucharest NATO summit in 2008, Georgia (and Ukraine) were offered memberships by the Western military alliance. Incidentally, Georgia, which was part of the pro-Moscow  Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) withdrew from it once Saakashvili came to office.

Russia, until this point, was dormant. It was still recovering from the trauma of the Soviet break-up and seemed to be in no position to resist the onward tide of Western “takeover” of what was, during the Cold War, termed the “iron curtain”.

Four years earlier, in 2004, the breakaway Baltic countries of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania had already become members of the European Union and NATO. The hold of the Western powers was expanding. The United States and the West had budgeted large military infrastructure to be based in the former Soviet provinces. The government in Moscow seemed to be in no position to resist. Within Russia itself, there was a clamour for Westernisation among a sizeable section of the population.

Moscow did the unexpected. Realising the country was facing an endgame in its fall as a world power, the government sent in troops to invade Georgia in August 2008 on the grounds that Russians in that country were in danger. The then president Dmitry Medvedev also used the excuse of a border dispute in the provinces of South Ossetia and Abkhazia to occupy the area.

One must remember that though Medvedev was the President when Russia invaded Georgia, the real power in was in the hands of then Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. Due to a constitutional constraint, Putin had for a term stepped down as president and enabled the election of an associate Medvedev in his place. When the next elections occurred in 2012, Putin returned as president and has remained ever since.

Either the rest of the world, particularly the West, was stunned by Russia’s unexpected invasion of Georgia or having broken up the Soviet Union the move by Moscow was generally dismissed as a one-off response.

The result was that there was no international outrage of the kind the world is witnessing now over Ukraine. Russian troops overcame Georgian resistance in five days. Though Russian troops occupied parts of Georgia including Zugdidi, Senaki, Poti and Gori, it withdrew troops in October.

Georgia’s moves to join the EU or NATO were effectively stalled. Since then, though there have been governments that were not exactly friendly with Moscow, Georgia learnt its lessons and until now has stayed away from provoking Russia.  By invading Georgia, Russia had made it clear it would get aggressive if any of its former republics, especially those which were immediate neighbours joined the Western alliance.

If, as some analysts fear, Putin’s intention is to regain all the lost Soviet territories, he would not have withdrawn from Georgia. The only region that continues to remain in a state of suspended animation are parts of disputed South Ossetia and Abkhazia where separatists are in power backed by Russia.

In Ukraine too, right from the time tensions arose following Kyiv’s moves to join NATO, Putin has repeatedly put forward a one-point demand to the Ukrainian government to drop the move and give an undertaking that it will not join the Western grouping. Moscow has also asked the US to give a similar assurance.

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In the absence of an assurance, Russia moved in to invade Ukraine. While few dispute the view that Putin is the aggressor and has no right to attack a sovereign nation, Moscow sees the entry of the West into its immediate neighbourhood as a threat to its existence. And, a big power like Russia is bound to response.

But, as Georgia has showed, there is no imperative for Moscow to hold on to areas in Ukraine it has occupied now. Similar to the 2008 invasion, it has used the opportunity now to settle the Ukrainian border dispute by force –recognising the separatist parts of the Donbas province – Donetsk and Luhansk – as an independent republic and backing the separatists to run the government there.

In the case of Georgia, the West was taken by surprise and did not react. In the case of Ukraine, European nations and the US have drummed up world opinion against Russia and have sought to paint Putin as the villain. The resistance too from Ukraine, unlike in Georgia earlier, is stiff due to the support it has received from the West. But, significantly, there has been no direct NATO intervention to help Ukraine other than imposing sanctions and attempting to ostracise Russia across the world including in sports.

It is not that the West does not wish to intervene in the conflict, but it realises that the consequences can be deadly for the world and there is no saying which way it will go. As some say, it could even end in a nuclear war the consequences of which are too frightening even to contemplate.

The West’s uncertain response is not going to help as Russia is no pushover. Moscow has already shown that it can halt the West in its tracks – in the case of Syria where the incumbent government of Bashar al-Assad continues to be in office despite the civil war, all thanks to Moscow. Or, for that matter Iran which has held on with backing from Russia, despite stringent Western sanctions.

Moreover, much of Europe is already in bed with Russia – depending on Moscow for crucial energy supplies which have been left untouched so far by sanctions.

The West may not have anticipated this, but in its eagerness to embrace the former Soviet states, it appears to have woken up a “sleeping giant” a la the US in World War II,  but that’s a story for another day.