The Realist

As an addendum to my previous post, consider this:

Nearly eight months after the war between Russia and Georgia, Russian troops continue to hold Georgian territory that the Kremlin agreed to vacate as part of a formal cease-fire, leaving a basic condition of that agreement unfulfilled.

The Russian military, working with the governments and the small military forces of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, two separatist regions in Georgia, has stationed forces in two large swaths of territory that were under Georgian control before the war. Observers and diplomats say Russia has also used attack helicopters and stationed tanks in areas where none existed before the war.

The sustained Russian military presence on land captured last summer — evident during two recent days spent in the area by two reporters — provides a backdrop of lingering disagreement between the West and Russia at a crucial time: The Obama administration is pledging to recalibrate the relationship with Russia, restore cooperation in other areas and explore a new treaty on nuclear arms.

…

“It’s business as usual,” said the analyst, Lawrence S. Sheets of the International Crisis Group. “Georgia is a country of four million people without any energy resources, and Russia is a country of 140 million people and with the ability to turn off Europe’s natural gas.”

Georgian officials have not been publicly critical of the United States. They have made clear, however, that their own ability to get Russia to comply with the agreement is essentially nonexistent.

Asked what tools were available to Georgia, Shota Utiashvili, who heads the analysis section of Georgia’s Interior Ministry, answered with a single word: “None.”

The Georgian Defense Ministry said that several thousand troops remained in the conflict area, and that Russia had a presence in at least 51 villages that it did not occupy before last summer.

The Ossetian government does not allow European monitors on its territory, and it denied access to a Times reporter seeking to cross the boundary; for these reasons, the Georgian numbers and assertions could not be independently confirmed.

With the situation at a stalemate, Irakli Alasania, who was Georgia’s ambassador to the United Nations during the war but now is in the opposition to Mr. Saakashvili, said the Russian occupation of territory beyond the old boundaries had settled into a new status quo.

The immediate question, he said, is whether the situation will get worse.

“The only thing we can do now, and the only thing we can hope for,” he said, “is to prevent another war.”

The joint statement released by the U.S. and Russia after Obama’s bilateral meeting with Medvedev in London said this:

We also started a dialogue on security and stability in Europe. Although we disagree about the causes and sequence of the military actions of last August, we agreed that we must continue efforts toward a peaceful and lasting solution to the unstable situation today. Bearing in mind that significant differences remain between us, we nonetheless stress the importance of last years six-point accord of August 12, the September 8 agreement, and other relevant agreements, and pursuing effective cooperation in the Geneva discussions to bring stability to the region.

This came quite far down the statement, and even though Georgian president Saakashvili has said he “practically rule[s] out” a further Russian incursion after the meeting and has said he has been assured the issue was raised at a high level, the statement actually seems to me to highlight a different point: that the U.S. can “disagree” with Russia about Georgia and still co-operate with Moscow.  So, for instance, would Obama abandon his plans to jointly decommission nuclear weapons with Russia, or co-operate on other issues, if Russia took further military moves in Georgia?  It seems far from clear what the answer to that question is, and while Russia is not going to do anything at this early stage in the new administration, it seems clear that important and disturbing choices lie in the future.