LESS than two decades after the lifting of the Iron Curtain, which kept the Soviet empire’s internal affairs a matter for specialists, Westerners are often hazy about the smaller “republics” that constituted it. It may still surprise a few people that a Georgia exists that was never on Hoagy Carmichael’s mind. They must, however, be vastly outnumbered by newspaper-readers who had never heard of South Ossetia before last weekend. The fighting that broke out between Russia and Georgia over this little patch of the Caucusus stirred echoes of Germany and Sudetenland in the 1930s, and Neville Chamberlain’s ill-fated remark about “a quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we know nothing”. Georgia is a great deal further away than Czechoslovakia; but no British Prime Minister would dream of implying that he knew little of Russia, or of its Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s ambitions to maintain an imperial-style sphere of influence over the country’s former satellites.
If for a time there was a whiff of moral impotency and appeasement in the West’s reaction to the conflict, it was inevitable and perhaps, in part, illusory. In Europe, where the might of Russia is experienced in terms of its near-monopoly over gas supplies, France did its best to obtain a ceasefire. Mr Bush, whose initial reaction was “grave concern”, was fortified by his rivals in Washington, and by Monday afternoon was speaking of “universal condemnation of Russian aggression”. But Russian aggression was not the whole story, anyway. There seems to have been enough truth in the charge that Georgia itself was being heavy-handed with a minority, much as Serbia was in Kosovo, to provide some justification for outside intervention, although not with the brutality with which Mr Putin initiated it, nor on such a scale.
After the announcement on Tuesday that Russia was ending its military operation, and supporting a ceasefire agreement, Moscow could count the operation as a success. Georgian forces had been prevented from taking any further action against South Ossetia and the other territory, Abhkazia, that desires separation; a buffer zone had been set up; and Mr Putin had taken the opportunity offered him to humiliate a leader who was dallying with NATO, and to get away with it. It remains to be seen whether Russia will resist the temptation to depose Mr Saakashvili. For countries such as the Ukraine, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, and Poland, for whom the example has been no doubt partly intended, the whole affair is a matter of particular concern. It is important that their warnings last weekend should be heeded, and that every signal should be given that the kind of action taken against Georgia could not be undertaken at so little cost to Russia elsewhere.
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