For those of us watching closely, monitoring events in the Caucasus, 2009 seems to be gearing up to be little better than the shock-and-horrors of 2008 that culminated in Russia's August invasion. While most countries and places are contented enough to live with one crisis at a time, the bubbling cauldron of the Black Sea region has become a veritable buffet line of intrigue, unrest, competing ideologies and a classic Westphalian great power tug-o-war.
The latest in what is becoming an ever-thickening deck of contentious incidents are the unsettling reports of an attempted coup d'etat engineered by members of the Georgian military at the Mukhrovani military base. Though the threat seems to have been defused and those allegedly responsible detained, the sheer alignment of events and interests questions the link of the attempted coup to the larger question mark of Russian intentions.
Almost immediately following the (official) cessation of hostilities after the August War, intense discussions have been held in the pages of journals, classrooms and war rooms to determine if Russia's seemingly shifting objectives meant that the Georgia invasion was an aberration, or if it was the heralding of a newly aggressive, militaristic policy. Though fears were initially directed at the unstable regions of Ukraine's pro-Moscow Crimea, reigniting tensions between Russia and Georgia have given way to worries that Russia intends to finish the job they started last August. The apparently prescient Pavel Felgenhauer, a Moscow-based independent defense analyst who ably predicted the last war, has been sounding the alarms about a possible renewal of conflict. From Felgenhauer's February article:
There is hope in Moscow that the Georgian opposition may still overthrow Mikheil Saakashvili's regime or that the Obama administration will somehow remove him. However, if by May, Saakashvili remains in power, a military push by Russia to oust him may be seriously contemplated.
Just as Felgenhauer's original predictions were vindicated by the brief-but-bloody war last August, recent events seem to support what increasingly looks like an inevitable slide back into conflict. Grievous provocations by Russian and separatist forces, appallingly ironic accusations of supporting North Caucasus separatists, attempted 'Putin Youth' infiltration, ramped up Russian propaganda efforts, and a cynical, geopolitically-motivated faux furor over long-planned NATO emergency response exercises (to which Russia was invited), expose what is looking more and more like a fabricated portfolio of Georgian 'provocations' to lend the appearance of credibility to a renewal of military action.
The real story here, however, is the nexus between the radical opposition, Russia, and the still-unclear quasi-rebellion that erupted on Tuesday. With the exception of Irakly Alasania and Giorgi Targamadze's moderate blocs, an increasingly desperate radical opposition has alienated itself from most of the Georgian public and seems committed to the transfer of power by coercion over election, resorting to escalating levels of violence against government authorities and seemingly intent on maximizing disruption disproportionate to their fast-dwindling numbers. On its face, this is troubling enough for such a young and patently unstable democracy, and lingering questions about the radical opposition's ties to the Kremlin casts the gravity of the situation into sharp relief.
A prominent insider, whose name I will not disclose for security reasons, characterized the backdrop of the situation as one where "all the [Georgian] political émigrés in Moscow are now in service of the Kremlin." Many of these Moscow-based Georgians, themselves vested beneficiaries of the Russian power vertical and from old Soviet nomenklatura families, maintain very close ties to the radical opposition, including Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili's erstwhile ally, Nino Burjanadze, herself from the old nomenklatura class.
"Socially," adds my informant, "these people are very close to her, her father and her husband." Burjanadze is today an outspoken opposition leader, who is coming off the tail end of a series of allegations linking her to an April conspiracy to incite political violence.
The implication is hardly veiled, but nonetheless compelling. Could it be that the increasingly frantic opposition is being bankrolled by Kremlin proxies and working in support of overthrowing the pro-West government? As unsettling and gut-wrenchingly Saakashvili-serving as it may seem, such an allegation is fast moving from 'crazy' territory, to within the realm of rational possibility. Indeed, to add to the twist, details slowly emerging about the Mukhrovani mutiny incident are further implicating portions of the radical opposition, and with it pointing to possible Russian involvement, and even military action.
One officer, Maj. Mardoni Chikhvanaia says that several weeks ago Maj. Levan Amiridze, commander of rangers' battalion, who is now at large, told him that "some people in the opposition" offered him to join the protest rally in Tbilisi with dozens of his solders.
This brings us full circle. Russia appears to be sensing that their efforts to see Saakashvili toppled through a counter-revolution are badly backfiring and will likely not succeed. With the Russian economy in compounding peril and a potential opportunity with the new U.S. Administration, Russia's first choice is probably not to launch a new, August-style invasion, which explains a heavy reliance on political and quasi-military proxies to achieve its policy goals. The last thing Russia wants is to do a replay of the Chechen wars, which was characterized more by Russia's brutality and ineffectiveness at counterinsurgency than the long-delayed pacification (through a Faustian vassal arrangement with the Chechen imperator, Ramzan Kadyrov). Acting in an auxiliary role to a 'native' uprising (another lesson learned from the Chechen wars in Kadyrov) is vastly preferable to suffering the slogs of invasion, extended occupation, and direct administration.
At the same time, Saakashvili's removal is fast changing from a pride issue to an economic one. With Russia's once-bursting fortunes wrecked by the economic recession, signs that Turkmenistan - whose sweetheart deal gas exports via Russia's Gazprom has been the fulcrum for the Kremlin's principal foreign policy instrument -- energy blackmail -- is looking to diversify its exports and get fair coin for its gas. This is giving Moscow a severe case of the jitters. With the only non-Russian pipeline to Europe running straight through Georgia, control of Georgia means safeguarding Russia's future economic health and geopolitical clout, for which the Kremlin depends upon for its social contract with already increasingly-restive regions.
The dangers are clearly mounting, and more than the fate of a South Caucasus republic is on the line. Total Russian dominance of the European energy market will irrevocably alter Europe-Russia and transatlantic relations with reverberations throughout Asia, much of it to the West's disadvantage. Even though Russia's goals may not favor overt aggression, the risk may be one that a paranoid Moscow is willing to take if it sees the Georgian transit corridor as the only way to preserve power in the face of a newly assertive Central Asia, and amidst these difficult economic times.
