Russia knew the West wouldn’t dare step in
Alan Philps reveals the careful calculations behind Vladimir Putin’s attack on
Georgia
With its brutal show of force in South Ossetia, Russia has proved one thing to the world: the bumbling old bear which used to fall flat on its face when it initiated a power play has been replaced by a much smarter beast.
The last time Russia launched a war in the Caucasus - against Chechen separatists in 1994 - the defence minister said the job could be done by "a single regiment in a couple of hours". In the end it took almost a decade and cost more than 100,000 dead. The attempt to turn Afghanistan communist had to be abandoned after ten years, in a humiliating defeat.
Recent attempts to manipulate Russia's neighbours through non-military means have not prospered either. In 2004 Russia put its money and media clout behind the pro-Moscow candidate in the Ukrainian
presidential elections, Victor Yanukovich. He won in a rigged ballot, but the result provoked the Orange Revolution, where street protests backed by the Kremlin's enemies got the vote overturned.
The crisis in South Ossetia, a mountainous territory which wants to secede from Georgia and join Russia, is certainly not over. But Vladimir Putin, who despite his reduced status as prime minister is still clearly the man in charge of Russia, can claim to have achieved his objective - to show that he is top dog in the Caucasus region, despite the collapse of the Soviet empire.
The secret of his success is not the Russian army, generally ill-equipped and poorly officered and no match for Nato forces. Instead, he is judging his enemies by a different yardstick - "the correlation of forces", a concept taught in Soviet times and part of Putin's KGB education.
Unlike the balance of forces, which looks at firepower, the correlation of forces takes into account the intentions and personalities on both sides. In this case, it means the
divisions in the West over how far to support Georgia, and the hot-headed character of the Georgian president, Mikhail Saakashvili. By these criteria, Russia had the stronger hand.
Putin has used every means to undermine Georgia as a way to stop it joining Nato. Georgia abuts Russia's southern border, and its accession to Nato would have demolished the Kremlin's pretensions to be the arbiter of security in the Caucasus.
Most significantly it is a vital energy conduit. The only oil and gas pipelines carrying energy to Western markets from the Caspian basin without crossing Russia pass through Georgian territory.
Putin laid a trap for Saakashvili after a Nato summit in April refused to give Georgia a timeline for joining the alliance. All it got was a promise that it would be allowed to join, at some unspecified time in the future. The Russians seized on this sign of Nato indecision to all but incorporate two separatist Georgian territories - Abkhazia on the Black Sea coast and South Ossetia, in the
foothills of the Caucasus mountains.
By August, Saakashvili could tolerate Russian provocations no longer, and launched a surprise attack to retake the South Ossetian 'capital', a small town called Tskhinvali. With this attack, he fell into Putin's trap. As the Kremlin had judged, he got scant support from Nato, beyond calls for a ceasefire. Abandoned by the countries he thought were his allies, he withdrew his troops from the territory on Sunday.
Russia does not need any more territory, least of all South Ossetia, a gangster-ridden smuggler's haven. But the three-day war has sent a clear message to Ukraine, another neighbour which would like to join Nato: the alliance will not come to your aid.
Nato's inability to protect its wilful protege is seen in Moscow as proof that Western power has reached its zenith and is now in decline, leaving space for the Kremlin to stretch its muscles. That may or may not be true. But Nato will have to think more clearly in future about who it chooses to embrace. 
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