In “Behind the Bluster, Russia is Collapsing,” Feshbach points to the volatile economic situation facing the nation’s oil-dependent economy and the host of public-health crises (ranging from appalling levels of tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS to the more mundane, but rampant, scourges of chronic alcoholism and heart disease) that continue to fuel Russia’s demographic decline.

Money graf:

Predictions that Russia will again become powerful, rich and influential ignore some simply devastating problems at home that block any march to power. Sure, Russia’s army could take tiny Georgia. But Putin’s military is still in tatters, armed with rusting weaponry and staffed with indifferent recruits. Meanwhile, a declining population is robbing the military of a new generation of soldiers. Russia’s economy is almost totally dependent on the price of oil. And, worst of all, it’s facing a public health crisis that verges on the catastrophic.

Feshbach’s broader arguments are already well-known to Russian area specialists. As Senior Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars (and Research Professor Emeritus at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service) Dr. Feshbach has for many years been the leading voice regarding the calamitous state of Russian demographics. Readers unfamiliar with his opinions, should give them their due.

A few days back a young Lieutenant named Vitalii Efremov posted a homemade rap video to the Russian-language site RuTube decrying the sorry living conditions and poor pay endured by Russian soldiers — and the Ministry of Defense’s apparent indifference to their suffering. As the UK’s Times OnLine notes:

The lieutenant modelled his video on Stan by Eminem, in which the rapper sends a letter to a frustrated fan. The Russian letter is to Anatoly Serdyakov, the Defence Minister, and is set against a backdrop of military decay: a crowded barrack room with peeling wallpaper, a scabrous bathroom, erratic shower water and broken equipment.

Just as Stan complains that Eminem does not reply to his post, so the lieutenant’s e-mail moans about a lack of response from the Minister. The video said that no progress had been made on granting cheap credits to professional soldiers, such as Lieutenant Efremov, who want to buy their own home.

The Minister was not amused. Efremov has since been deployed to Siberia.

To Gates’ credit, though, it seems to me he’s struck the right note on the South Ossetian crisis: Russia’s response to Georgia’s attempt to seize South Ossetia has been disproportionate and is clearly intended at reasserting authority in Russia’s near abroad, but that is a far cry from the Hitler / Munich parallels so loosely thrown around. In Gates’ words, Russia’s behavior is tsarist, not Soviet, and that makes an enormous difference. Gates is also suitably cautious on the subject of NATO membership for Georgia, which is a welcome breath of fresh air.

Frankly, I find Condoleezza Rice’s conduct more puzzling: if there’s one thing that scholarly training in Russian / East European history ought to teach, it’s the need to be very careful before jumping in the middle of ethnic / national disputes. Down that path lies madness.

Two quick points on the recognition of S. Ossetia and Abkhazia.

First, is there a clear difference of principle between the recognition of Kosovo and the recognition of S. Ossetia and Abkhazia?  All are small, barely viable, land-locked (Kosovo and S. Ossetia at least), all have outstanding territorial and ethnic disputes, all have been the victims and the victimizers in those ethnic disputes, all have a great power patron, all have their independence opposed by a great power, all have terrible problems with organized crime linked to the state.

And all are seceding / seceded from an imperfect democracy.  Yeah, the Kosovo War happened with Milosevic in power, but when the US recognized Kosovo independence, Milosevic was dead and Serbia was a democracy.  Indeed, the declaration was postponed to avoid affecting the Serbian presidential election.

Is there something I’m missing?

Second, I’m disturbed by the poor quality of the thinking on the part of the Bush administration.  I’m loath to say this, because I do not want this to sound partisan, and I’ve been critical of Clinton administration actions as well.  Nonetheless, when Condoleezza Rice describes the Russian recognition as “dead on arrival in the Security Council” thanks to the American veto, my response is “No kidding.  Just like Kosovo independence was, thanks to the Russian veto.”  That’s empty posturing, devoid of content and devoid of any serious thinking about how to get out of this mess that Saakashvili, Putin, Medvedev, and, yes, the leadership of the West, have gotten us into.

And that’s the reason why I have trouble coming up with analogies here. Great Powers smack around their smaller neighbors all the time, sometimes successfully, sometimes not (Soviets in Afghanistan, China in Vietnam) But smaller neighbors very seldom yank the chains of their Great Power neighbors, for the obvious reason that it’s world-record-class stupidity. The closest I can come, and I admit it’s not perfect, is Kosovo: Milosevic clearly believed he could act with impunity in Kosovo, despite a clearly stated American position that he needed to reach a political settlement there, and found out he was wrong. As a British commentator put it, Saakashvili is no Milosevic. Still, that’s as close as I can get.

Roundup: Historians’ Take

David R. Stone: Blowback in South Ossetia

Source: Special to HNN (8-11-08)

[Dr. David R. Stone is a professor of history at Kansas State University.]

There is a great deal of blame to go around for the disastrous war over South Ossetia. Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili deserves the greatest share, for starting a war to reassert control over South Ossetia that Russia can now finish on its own terms. The Russian government, with former President and current Prime Minister Vladimir Putin in the lead, has cynically taken the conflict Saakashvili began as a golden opportunity to flex its muscles, make Georgia an object lesson for the rest of Russia’s neighbors, rally Russian voters, and tighten its grip on Georgia’s breakaway South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

But in a classic example of blowback, past American policy also bears some responsibility for the mess in the Caucasus. While American training and equipment, intended to make Georgia a partner in the war on terror and future member of NATO, made Saakashvili overconfident in his ability to seize South Ossetia quickly and easily, the problem goes back further than that. However good American motivations were in Kosovo, the breakaway region of the former Yugoslavia, its actions there handed Russia what it needed to take full advantage of the crisis Georgia created. Violating Yugoslavia’s sovereignty—its right to be left alone—and its territorial integrity—its right to keep itself intact—has come back to breed war in Georgia.

The Clinton administration took a fateful step in March 1999 when it led NATO into war with Slobodan Milosevic’s Yugoslavia to protect the Albanians of Kosovo. Milosevic’s treatment of his Albanian minority in Kosovo was brutal, but the world is filled with brutal regimes. The Clinton administration justified interference against this particular brutal regime on the grounds that Milosevic’s policies were so murderous, and the flood of Albanian refugees fleeing state terror so overwhelming, that they negated Yugoslavia’s right to be left alone.

After NATO’s bombing campaign won automony for Kosovo, the Kosovar Albanians ran their own government under NATO protection, and lacked only formal legal status as an independent state. They achieved that in February 2008, when Kosovo’s parliament formally declared its independence, and was quickly recognized by the Bush administration, the United Kingdom, Germany, and a host of other Western nations. Though the population of Serbia—what is left of the former Yugoslavia—was overwhelmingly opposed to Kosovo’s formal separation, the United States came down firmly in favor of an embittered ethnic minority’s right to break free.

Kosovo established two precedents. First, governments violating norms of civilized conduct can find themselves under military attack. Second, ethnic minorities can claim and win independence, even if ethnic majorities want to keep them under control. Both those principles sound right and just. Who could be against them?

But we now see the consequences of those principles. Russia has long been furious over the West’s backing of Kosovo’s Albanians against first Yugoslavia and now Serbia. Too weak to do anything about NATO’s war in 1999, a much stronger Russia is now delighted to turn these arguments around against an American ally. The leadership of South Ossetia has appealed specifically to the precedent of Kosovo. Sergei Shamba, Foreign Minister of Georgia’s other breakaway region of Abkhazia, uses Kosovo to justify his own government’s ongoing preparations for military action.

The Russian government has taken the precise arguments America used for defending Kosovo against the Serbs and is now employing them to justify defending South Ossetia against the Georgians. The Clinton administration held that Slobodan Milosevic’s policies of ethnic cleansing and the humanitarian crisis they created meant that war was necessary, including bombing of Milosevic’s military machine and infrastructure far outside Kosovo itself. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov accuses Georgia of ethnic cleansing, while Vladimir Putin describes Georgia’s actions as genocide, and repeatedly referred to tens of thousands of Ossetian refugees fleeing into Russia.

Whether Russian accusations are accurate is impossible to tell, given how hard it is to get objective information from a war zone. But true or not, while the fighting rages the precedent America set in Kosovo gives Putin and the Russian government a wonderful tool to mobilize Russian public opinion behind this war. It allows Russia to accuse the United States of hypocrisy, especially effective when American credibility is already in question in much of the world.

The collapse of communism created dozens of Kosovos and Ossetias, where boundaries on the map don’t match ethnic identities. Trying to fix that by redrawing borders as the United States did in Kosovo, however well-intended, only opens to the door to a host of conflicts elsewhere. Russian-American relations are at a low not seen since the end of the Cold War. Changing that will require both sides to recognize that ethnic separatism is too dangerous a game for anyone to play.

I’d like to look instead at the precedent for what Georgian President Saakashvili wanted to happen, not what he’s ended up with: Croatia’s August 1995 Operation Storm.

Using military forces trained and supplied by the West, the Croats attacked the Serbian Krajina, a non-recognized, ethnic-separatist pseudo-state on Croatia’s sovereign territory. In two days, the Croats ended all resistance and reincorporated the Krajina into Croatia. Along the way, a big chunk of the Serbs of the Krajina fled.

This is pretty clearly what the Georgian government intended, as witnessed by the proclaimed goal of restoring “constitutional order” in South Ossetia. The difference, of course, is that Croatia succeeded where Georgia, barring a radical change in circumstances on the ground, failed. We’ll have to wait to get a sense of why that failure took place on tactical and operational grounds, but the overarching reason is Russia. In 1995, Russia was in no position, politically, militarily, or even geographically, to bring pressure to bear to protect the Serbs. In 2008, everything is different–the price of oil and America’s overcommitment elsewhere, to name two.

The result for Saakashvili is utter disaster. It’s tough for me to imagine circumstances under which the Russian troops now in South Ossetia will ever leave, and certainly not under any terms that Saakashvili would find acceptable.

As for that operational and tactical question–why Georgia wasn’t able to take South Ossetia despite the much vaunted American effort to build up the Georgian military–I don’t think we have anywhere near enough information to get a definitive answer. In my last post, I mentioned how the Chechen wars revealed the vulnerability of armored vehicles in urban environments to even irregular forces with rocket-propelled grenades. That seems to have happened here. In Croatia, however, the Serbian Krajina was mostly rural, avoiding much of the problem, and the Russian Army in Chechnya went through much of the Chechen countryside without a problem until running into a buzzsaw in the city of Groznyi. It looks here like the Georgians went straight for Tskhinvali, and that may have been the problem. They didn’t much choice–the geography of South Ossetia, with Tskhinvali on its very southern border, doesn’t present a lot of other options.

My overwhelming impression of events in South Ossetia is the enormous difficulty of sorting out what’s actually going on from conflicting accounts coming out of Georgia and Russia. Everything said below is highly preliminary and based on fragmentary information.

For example, Russian media are claiming 1) a failed Georgia effort to take Tskhinvali, the capital, and a number of burned-out Georgian armored vehicles in the streets of the town 2) Ossetian militia clearing the town of Georgian troops 3) Russian armored vehicles in Tskhinvali itself 4) the presence of large numbers of Russian “volunteers” on the Russian Federation-Georgian border, and Putin’s declaration that Russia may not be able to restrain them. Western media, however, report a proclamation by the mayor of Tbilisi Gigi Ugulava of a temporary cease-fire and a corridor to allow civilians to evacuate Tskhinvali, alongside occasional and unconfirmed claims that Georgian forces have taken the town

Several things strike me about this: first, why is the mayor of Tbilisi announcing the cease-fire and evacuation corridor for Tskhinvali? No question that Ugulava is personally close to Georgia President Saakashvili, but it seems quite odd that Ugulava would be taking this particular role, and suggests some disarray in governmental function. Second, on practical grounds allowing a corridor for refugees to get out would also allow a corridor for Russian troops to get in, and seem highly unwise. Pausing for any reason only allows more time for Russian aid to arrive and keep South Ossetia out of Georgian hands–as a result, this sounds a bit fishy to me. Third, the claim of burned-out Georgian armor is backed up by photographs, and would be in keeping with the experience of Russian army facing rocket-propelled grenades in Groznyi. The claim that Georgia informed Russia that it was acting to restore constitutional order in Tskhinvali suggests a major push, not merely retaliation for border incidents with South Ossetia.

On balance, then, based on highly incomplete evidence, this sounds to me like a Georgian attempt to take Tskhinvali (just inside South Ossetia, quite close to areas under Georgian control) that has failed in ways quite similar to the way that Russian efforts to take Groznyi failed, or at the very least took losses in ways similar to Groznyi.

Next, I wonder about timing. There was lots of speculation in the mass media about a Taiwanese declaration of independence during the Olympics, at least before Taiwanese politics shifted. Did Georgia plan on a coup de main while Putin was busy cheering on Russian athletes in Beijing? If that’s the case, and if the effort to take Tskhinvali has indeed failed, and if Russian armor is now arriving in force, this has backfired badly. I find it difficult to imagine circumstances that would get those Russian tanks out again.

Both sides have been claiming attacks on civilians. A couple things to note: the Georgians have particularly mentioned Russian bombing of the city of Gori. This is, of course, Stalin’s birthplace. At least when I was there in 1992, it had a still-standing Stalin statue and the hovel where Stalin was born surrounded and covered by a Greek temple. Gori is also, however, the gateway to South Ossetia, and the route by which Georgian troops would get there.

The Russians for their part have played this game exceedingly well. In addition to claiming to defend Russian citizens (and lots of South Ossetians have Russian passports), one of the first accusations out of Russian spokesmen was “ethnic cleansing,” and I am certain that was not accidental. In earlier posts here and here, I predicted baleful consequences from recognizing Kosovar independence, and I see those here. To pose rhetorical questions, what possible right could Russia have to send troops uninvited into the territory of a sovereign state and bomb populated areas? Well, the justification the Clinton administration used against Serbia over Kosovo was precisely “ethnic cleansing,” an accusation now leveled by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov against Georgia. In the wake of Western recognition for Kosovo, the West will have a hard time making a consistent case against Moscow.

I note that Georgian government websites appear to be down or overloaded. It will be fascinating to see if Georgia has come under the same sort of electronic attack that Estonia suffered a couple of years ago.