Places Close to Our Hearts

When U.S. President George W. Bush first met Russian president Vladimir Putin, he praised him as “an honest, straightforward man who loves his country.” Bush indicated that, more than a decade after the Cold War ended, it was “time to move beyond suspicion and towards straight talk.” Thereafter, both presidents established a good working relationship based, in part, on candor and frankness. Putin’s speech at the Munich security conference did not please his hosts, but it had the virtue of clarifying important differences. Similarly, his speech to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)–Russia Council meeting in Bucharest was forthright and blunt. The compromise language of the Bucharest Declaration—Georgia and Ukraine “will become members of NATO”—was a personal rebuke to the Russian leader, for he had made it clear that NATO expansion to these countries was a “red line” for Russia. Two years earlier Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov warned publicly that Georgia and Ukraine joining NATO could lead to “a collossal shift in global geopolitics.” But those promoting NATO membership for both believed the Russian position amounted to anachronistic sphere-of-influence thinking, and they were determined to prevent what they described as a “Russian veto” on NATO expansion. Putin’s remarks on Georgia in Bucharest—discussed in chapter 4—attracted few headlines. His alleged comments on Ukraine, however, were viewed with alarm at the time by some and considered ominously prophetic by many after 2008, and especially so in the spring of 2014. According to an unnamed NATO country official, an irate Putin turned to Bush and said: “George, you do realize that Ukraine is not even a state. What is Ukraine? Part of its territory is Eastern Europe but the greater part is a gift from us!” Putin reportedly then indicated that should Ukraine join NATO, the state may cease to exist. Russia would then tear off Crimea and eastern Ukraine from the rest of the country. Six years later it appeared Russia was doing precisely this.

Territorial Integrity

On the Evening of August 7, 2008, Inal Pliyev was working late at his office in the center of Tskhinval(i). A former journalist, Pliyev was head of communications for the self-declared South Ossetian Republic. Earlier in the evening, Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili had declared a unilateral ceasefire after days of skirmishes between Georgian forces and South Ossetian militias. Pliyev, however, was still in the office because of information about increasing Georgian artillery and armor concentrations near the town. “First we heard what sounded like grenade launchers—after the years of conflict everyone here knows what sound is made by which weapon. I did not pay much attention to that.” But when he heard the first sounds of Grad missiles, Pliyev turned off his computer and ran for his life. “All parts of the city came under fire simultaneously. It was so intense, that you couldn’t even register a fraction of time between explosions, there were multiple explosions every second. The fire was non-stop. Electricity and gas supplies were cut off during the first minute of the shelling, and for the most part phone service was also cut off.” One shell fell next to the government building where Pliyev and his colleagues huddled. “The building shook so much that part of the ceiling bent down, and we ran into an underground bunker in a nearby non-government building. Explosions were becoming louder and even more frequent. We could not leave our hideout, and everyone was getting ready to die. Even more we feared being taken prisoner by Georgian soldiers. It was especially terrifying when we heard machine gun fire. Our only thought was to avoid being taken prisoner at any cost. Our only hope was for the Russian air force, we were waiting for it to come, so that Georgians would leave our city. But it wasn’t coming.” Pliyev had his mobile phone, and as its battery ran out he spoke to various Russian media outlets pleading for Russian military help.

Geopolitical Catastrophe

On April 25, 2005, President Vladimir Putin addressed the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation. In his lengthy speech Putin laid out a series of priorities for the Russian state in the coming decade. These priorities were not new—he had spoken about them in a similar address the year before—and their central aim was well known, “to build,” as he put it in his address, “an effective state system within the current national borders.” However, it was not Putin’s discussion of democracy and corruption in state institutions that generated headlines in the Western media. Instead it was Putin’s prologue for his reform agenda: . . . Above all, we should acknowledge that the collapse of the Soviet Union was a major geopolitical disaster of the century. As for the Russian nation, it became a genuine drama. Tens of millions of our co-citizens and compatriots found themselves outside Russian territory. Moreover, the epidemic of disintegration infected Russia itself. Individual savings were depreciated, and old ideals destroyed. Many institutions were disbanded or reformed carelessly. Terrorist intervention and the Khasavyurt capitulation [the agreement that ended the first Chechen war] that followed damaged the country’s integrity. Oligarchic groups—possessing absolute control over information channels— served exclusively their own corporate interests. Mass poverty began to be seen as the norm. And all this was happening against the backdrop of a dramatic economic downturn, unstable finances, and the paralysis of the social sphere. Many thought or seemed to think at the time that our young democracy was not a continuation of Russian statehood, but its ultimate collapse, the prolonged agony of the Soviet system. But they were mistaken. . . . Putin’s rhetorical device was a conventional decline-and-renewal trope, describing the era of national decline and humiliation that set the stage for his heroic mission of restoring Russia’s strength and capacity. However, Associated Press and BBC news service reports on the speech focused only on one phrase, to which they gave a different translation from that released by the Kremlin (cited above).

Why Does Russia Invade Its Neighbors?

It was supposed to be China’s coming-out party, a moment in the global spotlight affirming its arrival as an economic superpower. But hours before the opening ceremonies of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, news of a war in the Caucasus flashed across the world’s TV screens. On the southern slopes of the Caucasus Mountains, the state of Georgia launched a military offensive against South Ossetia, a small breakaway territory beyond its control since the Soviet collapse. Georgia’s offensive quickly brought Russia to the defense of its local Ossetian allies. As Soviet-era tanks rolled through the Roki tunnel, the only land connection between South Ossetia and Russia, Russian aircraft bombed Georgian targets in the region and beyond. For the first time since the Cold War ended, Russia was invading a neighboring state. Instead of glowing stories about China, speculation about a new Cold War filled the front pages of the Western press. Yet within a week the war was over and a ceasefire agreed. Thereafter a rapidly moving global financial crisis displaced what seemed a harbinger of geopolitical rupture to an afterthought. As quickly as it had flared, the Russo-Georgian war disappeared, and with it talk of a return to geopolitics past. Six years later Russia was in the global spotlight as host of the XXII Olympic Winter Games in Sochi, located on the shores of the Black Sea at the western end of the Caucasus Mountains. Despite well-grounded fears of terrorism, the Olympics were a triumph for Russia and its leadership. Yet a few days later, the world recoiled in shock as Russia once again invaded a neighboring state. Responding to a perceived “fascist coup” in Kyiv, unmarked Russian military personnel seized control of the Ukrainian province of Crimea, once part of Soviet Russia and home to Russia’s Black Sea Fleet. A hastily organized referendum followed, creating the appearance of legitimacy for Russia to formally annex the province, and the city of Sevastopol, in late March 2014.

Geopolitics Thick and Thin

On November 24, 2015, a Turkish F-16 fighter jet shot down a Russian Sukhoi Su-24M aircraft on the Syria-Turkey border. For seventeen seconds the Russian aircraft crossed the southern tip of a salient of Turkish territory that Syria claimed rightfully belonged to it. Two Russians ejected from the plane over Syria. A local Turkmen militia, commanded by a Turkish citizen, fired at the aviators, killing one. A second Russian serviceman was killed during a rescue mission to save the surviving aviator. The incident, recorded on radar systems by many countries and partially captured on video camera, was the first time since the Korean War that a North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) country’s fighter jet destroyed a Soviet/Russian Air Force aircraft. Fortunately the event did not escalate into a full-blown NATO Russia crisis, although with tensions high over the Ukraine crisis and two authoritarian leaders at loggerheads, it could well have done so. There were background accusations. Turkish president Erdoğan was aggrieved that Russia was bombing co-ethnic kin in its southern near abroad while aiding Kurdish separatists, while Russian president Putin saw Turkey as an accomplice of international terrorists. Entwined territorial and terrorist anxieties, as well as near abroad insecurities, preoccupied both men. Had Russia responded with force against Turkey, this could have triggered Article V of NATO’s Washington Treaty, and NATO members would have faced the prospect of war with Russia over a tiny piece of territory in the Middle East most knew nothing about. Relations between the NATO alliance and Russia are now at their lowest point since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Airspace violations, incidents at sea, military training exercises, and hybrid war hysteria have kept tensions high. After Crimea, NATO moved to strengthen its capacity to respond to perceived Russian encroachment on the Baltic countries. The Obama administration’s European Reassurance Initiative was launched in June 2014 with a $1 billion budget for training and temporary rotations. In a speech in Riga in September 2014, President Obama declared: “We’ll be here for Estonia.

The Novorossiya Project

In breaking apart a sovereign territorial state, it is helpful, if not always necessary, to have an alternative geopolitical imaginary at the ready and for this ersatz replacement to have some degree of local credibility and support. When Putin decided to annex Crimea, the move was intuitively presented as a historic Russian territory rejoining the motherland and, further, as the correction of an arbitrary and capricious historical wrong. The demographics of Crimea were such that this storyline resonated with most but not all Crimeans. But when it came to the rest of Ukraine, the Putin administration faced a dilemma. Ukraine’s modern history was intimately entangled with that of Russia. Tsarist and Russian Orthodox Christian discourse rendered it the homeland of a common Rus(s)ian people, its capital Kyiv as the mother of all Russian cities, and its land as a Little Russia populated by little Russians. The Bolsheviks recognized Ukrainians as a distinctive nation, constituting it as a fraternal Slavic nation alongside Russians. The Great Patriotic War bound the countries together, first in trial and suffering, and then in redemption and victory. Putin evoked these very discourses—“we are one people, Kiev is the mother of Russian cities. Ancient Rus is our common source and we cannot live without each other”—in his speech recommending annexation of Crimea. Holding that Ukrainians and Russians are one people while, at the same time, seizing territory from Ukraine required a hyperbolic fascist-threat storyline to make sense. According to this scenario, anti-Semitic nationalists from western regions not part of the Russian Empire were Nazi collaborators during the Great Patriotic War. Now, in the seventieth year of Ukraine’s liberation from Nazi rule, these forces were back on the streets and through violent protests on the Maidan managed to oust a legitimate government and seize power in a military coup. Ukraine, as a consequence, was in territorial crisis as ordinary ethnic Russians and Russian-speaking people, concentrated particularly in the southeast, sought protection from the fascist junta now ensconced in Kyiv. In these circumstances, it was understandable that former tsarist and Soviet identities in regions historically close to Russia resurfaced.

Introduction: Near Abroads

On my third evening in Russia, the world changed. I was in Stavropol, a city founded by Prince Gregory Potemkin at the time of the American Revolution as one of ten fortresses to defend the borders of the expanding Russian Empire. To the south were the Caucasus, formidable mountains and myriad peoples. Stavropol grew as an administrative center of tsarist and later Soviet power. It briefly fell to the Wehrmacht in 1942 as the invading army drove unsuccessfully toward the oilfields of Baku. Later, a popular young party secretary from the area got noticed in Moscow, joined the Politburo, and in 1985 became general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms would inadvertently lead to a geopolitical earthquake, the end of the Cold War in Europe, and the unthinkable—the collapse of the Communist empire built by Lenin and Stalin. That evening the provost of Stavropol State University toasted the health of the international academics attending the conference starting the next morning. Many other benevolent toasts were exchanged, and a singularly somber one. A researcher with the Memorial Human Rights Center reminded us that a war raged nearby in Chechnya, an “inner abroad” of Russia. Here Russia’s new president had approved the indiscriminate shelling of a Russian city and a dirty war against citizens redefined as “terrorists.” Returning to our hotel that evening in a bus under armed guard, a Croatian friend and I were chatting when told to turn on the television. Russian television was broadcasting footage of airplanes crashing into skyscrapers in lower Manhattan on what seemed like a continuous loop. The full magnitude of what had happened was only apparent the next day. Like many, the Twin Towers were entwined with personal memories—first seeing them in rural Ireland on a pennant my uncle brought back from his vacation to New York, and later visiting the observation deck with my parents and friends. Furthermore, the attack on the Pentagon was only two miles from my home, a few more from where I worked, and all too close to some former students who worked in the building.

Rescue Missions

The Georgian Military Assault on Tskhinval(i) began with an artillery barrage by truck-mounted Grad missiles that rained down in a largely indiscriminate manner on the urban area. OSCE monitors in the city counted rounds exploding at intervals of fifteen to twenty seconds. Then Georgian forces began a ground offensive. Scores were killed, mostly civilians but also combatants and, significantly, Russian soldiers serving as peacekeepers. Those wounded were taken to make­shift basement “hospitals” as fighting raged on the streets above them. Many bled to death. Inal Pliyev’s initial claim, made in the fog of war, that two thousand civilians died proved to be more than a tenfold exaggeration, but it was his number that traveled around the world before any verifiable body count got underway. And attached to the false number was the disputatious charge of “genocide” from the script of the conflict already written by the Ossetian authorities. News of the Georgian attack and Russian response reached Beijing (four hours ahead of Tbilisi), where U.S. president George W. Bush was standing in a line of visiting dignitaries in the Great Hall of the People to greet President Hu Jintao. A few places ahead of him was Vladimir Putin. They briefly talked, and when Bush returned to his hotel he placed a call to President Dmitry Medvedev. Medvedev, according to Bush, was angry and charged that Mikheil Saakashvili was a war criminal responsible for the deaths of more than fifteen hundred civilians as well as Russian peacekeepers. Bush told Medvedev that the United States was concerned about the “disproportionality” of the Russian response, adding, “We are going to be with them.” In his memoir Bush recounts how he sought de-escalation while wondering if Russia would have been as aggressive if the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) had approved Georgia’s Membership Action Plan (MAP) application. Later, at the Opening Ceremony of the Olympics, Bush was in the same row as Putin and asked those in between to shift seats so they could speak. Through a translator Putin also described Saakashvili as a war criminal.

A Cause in the Caucasus

In December 2007, Damon wilson returned to the White House to take a position as senior director for Europe in the National Security Council of George W. Bush. Having spent the previous year in Iraq, Wilson was back working on an issue he was passionate about: North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) enlargement. Prior service in the State Department, the NATO secretary general’s office, and the White House gave Wilson familiarity with Euro-Atlantic divisions on the subject. Thrust into preparation for the forthcoming NATO summit in Bucharest, he was surprised that no internal policy process had yet generated a formal presidential decision on whether the United States was willing to offer a path to NATO membership for Georgia and Ukraine. Both states underwent “color revolutions” that saw fraudulent election results overturned and new elections sweep dynamic Westernizing leaders into power, events many Russian officials viewed as Western-fomented coups. Three years later in 2007, things were not looking so positive in either state. In Georgia, Mikheil Saakashvili’s government had violently suppressed antigovernment demonstrations a few weeks earlier, while Ukraine’s pro-Western leadership had descended into internal factionalism. Wilson, however, knew how strong the president’s instincts were on support for fledgling young democracies in post-Soviet space. Bush had announced his commitment at the outset of his presidency in a speech at Warsaw University where he declared: “No more Munichs, no more Yaltas.” During Bush’s tenure, NATO had admitted seven new member states, including the Baltic Republics, tacitly acknowledged as part of the Soviet Union at Yalta in 1945. Approaching his last NATO summit, Bush had a legacy opportunity to push enlargement farther east and south, to large strategic territories that were part of the original Soviet Union. Secretaries Condoleezza Rice and Robert Gates were skeptical but others such as U.S. ambassador to NATO, Victoria Nuland, were supportive. After a “deep dive” into the question by White House staff, Bush decided in late February that the United States should mobilize all its diplomatic power to offer a Membership Action Plan (MAP), a first step toward NATO membership, to both Georgia and Ukraine at Bucharest.