All Posts Tagged With: "Begun"

“…(T)he collapse of the Soviet Union was “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the [20th] century, ” Russian Prime Minister Putin.

Last week, South Ossetian separatists - supported by Moscow - poured machine gun and mortar fire into neighboring Georgian villages. Georgia retaliated by attacking the separatist capital Tskhinvali with artillery, providing the pretext for Moscow’s invasion of Georgia.

Stanford University’s Russia scholar Michael McFaul sums up the use of overwhelming force by Russia in Georgia this week as nothing less than “a signal to everyone that Russia is back - and Russia is going to try and dominate this region of the world,” according to a report in The Los Angeles Times.

Fighting has ended, for now, in the Russo-Georgian War but scholars and pundits alike are resurrecting such iconic terms as “Cold War,” “Iron Curtain,” and “spheres of influence.” Make no mistake that Putin’s Russia has no intention of allowing a pro-western government within what he views as Russia’s domain, and is more than willing to kill a few thousand people to prove it.

“Historians will come to view Aug. 8, 2008, as a turning point no less significant than Nov. 9, 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell. Russia’s attack on sovereign Georgian territory marked the official return of history, indeed to an almost 19th-century style of great-power competition, complete with virulent nationalisms, battles for resources, struggles over spheres of influence and territory…,” says Robert Kagan, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, in a Washington Post column.

Burnishing his enormous egotism and ambition t be greater than even Stalin Russian Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin, who raced back from the Bejing Olympics to take command, charged that the U.S. has displayed a “Cold War mentality” in its friendship with leaders in the Georgian capital of Tbilisi, according to The Times. Left wing sources chimed in to blame the U. S. even claiming it actually started the conflict.

Polemics aside, think-tankers has been burning the midnight oil analyzing just what Mr. Putin is up to. It seems to me simplistically easy given Putin decree that the collapse of the Soviet Union was “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the [20th] century.” Sensing an opportunity with a potential new liberal, Eurocentric naïve, inexperienced U. S. administration the last few days then are the beginning of what Putin is designing as a Russian renaissance.

“Armed with wealth from oil and gas; holding a near-monopoly over the energy supply to Europe; with a million soldiers, thousands of nuclear warheads and the world’s third-largest military budget, Vladimir Putin believes that now is the time to make his move,” Kagan says.

Ariel Cohen, senior research fellow in Russian and Eurasian Studies and International Energy Security at The Heritage Foundation, has ferreted out what he believes to be the Putin strategy including:

• expulsion of Georgian troops and termination of Georgian sovereignty in South Ossetia and Abkhazia;
• “regime change” by bringing down President Mikheil Saakashvili and installing a more pro-Russian leadership in Tbilisi;
• preventing Georgia from joining NATO and sending a strong message to Ukraine that its insistence on NATO membership may lead to war and/or its dismemberment;
• Shifting control of the Caucasus, and especially over strategic energy pipelines, by controlling Georgia; and
• recreating a 19th-century-style sphere of influence in the former Soviet Union, by the use of force if necessary.

More importantly, in my opinion, Putin wants to demonstrate that he can sabotage at will American and European Union (EU) declarations about integrating Commonwealth of Independent States members into Western structures such as NATO.