Putin's Wars: The Rise of Russia's New Imperialism

Over the past sixty-five years—not counting the armed interventions of the Warsaw Pact in Hungary (1956) and Czechoslovakia (1968)—the Soviet Union/Russia has fought five wars:

1. The Cold War (1945–1989)

2. The War in Afghanistan (1979–1989)

3. The First Chechen War (1994–1996)

4. The Second Chechen War (1999–2009)

5. The war with Georgia (2008)

The first three wars were lost; the last two were won. The two last wars were Putin’s wars: these military actions were carefully prepared, meticulously planned, and ruthlessly conducted by the Putin regime. Why did Putin succeed where his predecessors failed? What are the differences between these wars? And—an even more important question—what role does war play in Putin’s overall strategy? I will try to answer these questions here and in the following chapters.

THE COLD WAR: CONTAINMENT VERSUS EXPANSIONISM

Much has been written about the origins of the Cold War. In September 1944—only three months after the Allied invasion in Normandy and eight months before the capture of Berlin by the Red Army—the American diplomat and Kremlin watcher George Kennan predicted with great foresight not only the advent of the East-West conflict, but he also indicated its origin. Writing about “the Russian aims in Eastern and Central Europe,” Kennan wrote: “Russian efforts in this area are directed to only one goal: power. The form this power takes, the methods by which it is achieved: these are secondary questions.”[1] And he continued:

That there were, indeed, reasons to worry would soon become clear when Stalin’s Soviet Russia began to install grim communist dictatorships in the countries that fell into its sphere of influence. In July 1947, eight months before the communist coup d’état in Prague, George Kennan published in Foreign Affairs his famous anonymous article, signed “Mr. X,” on “The Sources of Soviet Conduct.”[3] In this article he formulated the principles of what was to become the “containment” policy. This policy would be adopted by President Truman and would lead, two years later—on April 4, 1949—to the foundation of NATO. The origins of the Cold War were the unprecedented territorial expansionist greed of Soviet Russia, the undisguised, unfettered imperialism of Stalin’s totalitarian regime that refused to respect the right of national self-determination of its new “brother nations.” For forty years it led to a huge military buildup by the two superpowers. And it ended, quite suddenly and unexpectedly, with the collapse of the Soviet Empire. This collapse was experienced by the Russians as a defeat and by many in the West as a victory (even if, for reasons of expediency, they did not always say so openly).

THE WAR IN AFGHANISTAN: ANDROPOV’S WAR?

When the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in December 1979, this was interpreted by the West as a new phase of Soviet imperialist expansion. It was considered a war of conquest with the aim to add new territory to the Soviet bloc. But, with hindsight, things were more complicated. Initially, there was not so much a push from the Russian side to intervene militarily, as a pull by Afghan communist factions to draw the Soviet Union into an internal, Afghan conflict. The Afghan Communist Party (PDPA) had seized power in April 1978. Although the plot had been directed and steered by the KGB, it soon became clear that for the Soviet Union the communist coup d’état was an ambiguous event. The Soviet government had always enjoyed a good relationship with the former, noncommunist Afghan governments—not only when Afghanistan was still a monarchy, but also after the king, Zahir Shah, had been deposed by General Mohammad Daoud in July 1973. Communist insurgents killed Daoud in April 1978, and it was the radical Khalq faction of the Afghan Communist Party—led by Nur Mohammad Taraki and Hafizullah Amin—that came to power. Amin became prime minister, and Taraki became president. It was, however, the second faction in the Communist Party, the more moderate Parcham faction led by Babrak Karmal, which had the favor of Moscow. The Khalq soon came to persecute this faction.

The new regime was soon confronted with a growing opposition inside the country. In March 1979, there was a violent rebellion in Herat, Afghanistan’s third largest city. During this rebellion several Soviet advisers were executed. The PDPA, fearful of losing control, turned to Moscow with a demand for military support. A meeting was arranged in Moscow on March 20, 1979, between President Taraki and four Soviet heavyweights: Aleksey Kosygin, chairman of the Council of Ministers; Andrey Gromyko, Minister of Foreign Affairs; Dmitry Ustinov, Minister of Defense; and Boris Ponomarev, head of the International Department of the Central Committee of the CPSU. Taraki not only demanded weapons, but also military personnel, including pilots and tank drivers. Although Kosygin refused any direct military involvement of Soviet troops on the ground in Afghanistan, Moscow became more nervous when the KGB hinted at the supposed unreliability of the Afghan prime minister, Hafizullah Amin. Yury Andropov, the head of the KGB, feared that Amin could become an “Afghan Sadat,” turning, eventually, to the West.[4] “Andropov suspects him to be an agent of the CIA: logical if one knows that Amin has passed four years at Columbia University.”[5] This suspicion led to dramatic events in the late summer of 1979. KGB agents in Kabul told President Taraki that he should arrest Amin. When, on September 14, Amin was invited to Taraki’s palace to talk with Soviet representatives, Taraki’s guards opened fire and tried to kill him. But Amin escaped. He mobilized his own militia and had Taraki arrested. On October 9, 1979, President Taraki was executed. Hereupon the Soviet Union decided to intervene and replace Amin with its own favorite, Babrak Karmal. Amin was killed by Vympel Spetsnaz troops. These are KGB special forces consisting of multilingual officers specializing in combat and sabotage in enemy territory. “Created in 1979,” wrote J. Michael Waller, “Vympel served as the shock force prior to the invasion of Afghanistan. In its first foreign operation, Vympel commandos stormed the presidential palace in Kabul and assassinated the inhabitants, including Afghan President Hafizullah Amin and seven of his children. This allowed the Soviet protégé, Babrak Karmal, to “invite” the Soviet army to intervene in his country.”[6] Amin’s assassination took place on December 25, 1979. The next day, Karmal declared himself secretary general of the Afghan Communist Party and prime minister.

The Soviet troops were to stay in Afghanistan for more than a full decade with over a hundred thousand troops permanently involved. In this period at least twenty-five thousand Russian troops were killed. Over one million Afghans lost their lives in the conflict. An important question is who pushed Brezhnev, at that time in poor health, to take the decision to invade Afghanistan. In the politburo meeting of December 12, 1979, in which the decision was taken, Kosygin, who opposed an intervention, was absent. Many point to KGB chief Yury Andropov as the main instigator. Artyom Borovik, for instance, wrote: “Many servicemen and MID [Ministry of Foreign Affairs] workers told me that the script for the events in Afghanistan was written by the KGB. Initially, Andropov was against the idea of an invasion, but eventually he followed the same reflex that he’d learned some twenty years earlier in Hungary, where he served as an ambassador and where troops had to be sent in 1956.”[7] This interpretation is supported by Svetlana Savranskaya, a political analyst.

It seemed, indeed, that the personal memorandum, sent in early December 1979 by Andropov to Brezhnev, determined Brezhnev’s decision.[9] Anatoly Dobrynin, former Soviet ambassador to the United States, shared this view.[10] This confirms the observation made by Thierry Wolton that “the Kremlin knew the external world over the borders as if over the high walls of a citadel through the prism of what was reported to it by the KGB. The Organs, in this way, could manipulate the members of the Central Committee and the Politburo, which, in the closed Soviet universe, was a sacred power.”[11]

The Soviet military, however, was not happy with the decision to invade Afghanistan. When, on December 10, 1979, Dmitry Ustinov, the defense minister, informed the chief of the General Staff, Nikolay Ogarkov, of the plan, the latter ”was surprised and outraged by such a decision.” He said he was “against the introduction of troops, calling it ‘reckless.’”[12] Georgy M. Kornienko, who at that time was deputy foreign minister under Gromyko, wrote, referring to the position taken by his boss in the politburo meeting on December 12, 1979: “From my conversations with him, already after the introduction of troops, I concluded that it was not Gromyko who said ‘A’ in favour of such decision, but that he was ‘pressured’ into it by Andropov and Ustinov together. Which one of those two was the first to change their initial point of view and spoke in favour of sending troops, one may only guess.”[13] It is a fair guess to assume that it was ultimately Yury Andropov who pushed his colleagues in the politburo—including General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev—to take this decision. It was, eventually, Andropov’s seven hundred special forces of the KGB, stationed in Kabul, who made the opening move by attacking the presidential palace and killing Amin. The justification given by the Soviet government for its intervention: that it had been asked for support by the Afghan government, was rather dubious. It is true that in March 1979 President Taraki had asked the Soviet Union to intervene by sending troops. At that time, however, the Soviet leadership had reacted negatively to this request. In December Taraki was no longer there, and Amin, who had executed his predecessor and taken his place, was certainly not in favor of a Soviet intervention. It is, therefore, not surprising to hear that “the Soviet troops… suffered from the confusion about their goals—the initial official mission was to protect the PDPA regime; however, when the troops reached Kabul, their orders were to overthrow Amin and his regime.”[14]

If one reconstructs the events, it becomes clear that neither the Soviet military, nor the Soviet Ministry of Foreign Affairs, nor even Brezhnev himself, were at the roots of the fatal—and in the end self-defeating—decision to invade Afghanistan, but the KGB. The “Sadat” role that Andropov ascribed to Amin was probably a deliberate attempt at disinformation by this long-serving KGB chief to manipulate the Soviet leadership. It would not have been the first time. Already in 1956, when he was Soviet ambassador in Budapest, Andropov was one of the main instigators of the Soviet intervention, falsely informing Khrushchev, who initially was reluctant to intervene, that the Russian embassy was being attacked. In 1968 Andropov would again be among the hardliners who were in favor of sending Warsaw Pact troops into Czechoslovakia to crush the Prague Spring.[15] Andropov, a highly intelligent man, was an undisputed expert in manipulation. Ion Mihai Pacepa, a former Romanian two-star general, and the highest intelligence officer to have ever defected from the Soviet bloc, a man who knew Andropov personally, characterized him as follows:

Andropov may be considered the secret “godfather” of Russia’s war in Afghanistan.[17] The irony, however, was that this costly, protracted, and unwinnable guerrilla war in a mountainous and hostile environment would soon exhibit the internal weaknesses of Soviet society. This would convince Andropov—even before he became general secretary of the CPSU in 1983—of the necessity of a fundamental and profound reform of the Soviet system. And the man whom he had in mind to conduct these reforms was Mikhail Gorbachev.[18]

THE FIRST CHECHEN WAR: FOUR DIFFERENCES WITH FORMER WARS

Artyom Borovik wrote: “As a general to whom I became quite close in Afghanistan put it, ‘All of the wars that Russia lost led to social reforms, while all of the wars it won led to the strengthening of totalitarianism.’”[19] This seems, indeed, to be true in the cases of both the Cold War and the war in Afghanistan. These two lost wars led, first, to Gorbachev’s perestroika, and, subsequently, to the introduction of a market economy and a pluralistic democracy. But one may ask if this reformist dynamic was still operative when the Soviet Union’s successor state, the Russian Federation, lost the First Chechen War (1994–1996). There were, to begin with, four important differences between the Cold War and the war in Afghanistan on the one hand, and the war in Chechnya on the other. These differences concerned the

1. subject of the war,

2. its ideological interpretation,

3. its geopolitical meaning, and

4. the role of the army in the war.

In regard to the first point, the Cold War and the war in Afghanistan were conducted by the Soviet Union. The war in Chechnya, however, was conducted by the Russian Federation. In the latter case, the actor was no longer the world’s second superpower, but a (smaller) country that had gone through a process of decolonization and was struggling to maintain its great power status.

The second difference was that the two former wars were still interpreted in the ideological framework of Marxism-Leninism. This meant that both wars were considered expansive wars. Marxism offered an ideological certainty that the world was irrevocably moving toward the socialist world revolution. Even the Cold War was considered only a temporary stalemate between capitalism and socialism, which—in the end—would give way to a historic victory of socialism over capitalism. Yury Andropov, like his mentor, the party ideologue Mikhail Suslov, still saw the war in Afghanistan through this prism. It was a step in the progressive evolution of the socialist camp. The First Chechen War, however, was completely different. Russia had definitively lost its faith in the socialist revolution. It had accepted the loss of the communist dream and recognized the superiority of the capitalist system. There was, therefore, no longer an ideologically conditioned certainty of a victory. The outcome of the Chechen war was considered unpredictable and contingent.

A third difference was geopolitical. The war in Chechnya was not a war conducted by a proud, expanding empire outside its borders, but a war conducted by a recently amputated empire inside its borders. Russia, which had shrunk to the size of sixteenth-century Muscovy, fought in Chechnya not an offensive, expansive war, but a defensive war against the danger of dismemberment.

A fourth difference was the dire situation of the Russian army. Demoralized by the demise of the Soviet Union, reduced in numbers, underfunded, undertrained, and deeply corrupt, the Russian army was a shadow of its powerful and feared Soviet predecessor. Additionally, the Russian leadership made important psychological and strategic miscalculations. It was a psychological miscalculation to underestimate the strength of the Chechen drive for national independence. This first miscalculation led to a second, strategic miscalculation, which was to consider the capture of Grozny and the rest of Chechnya as an easy walkover.

THE FIRST CHECHEN WAR: YELTSIN’S WAR

On October 27, 1991, the Chechens chose Djohar Dudayev, a former Soviet general, as their president. Moscow immediately contested the legitimacy of the elections. Five days later Dudayev declared the independence of Chechnya. President Yeltsin reacted on November 8, 1991, by declaring a state of emergency in Chechnya and sending 2,500 troops of the Interior Ministry and the KGB to the rebellious republic. These troops were blocked at Grozny airport by thousands of demonstrators. Fearing an escalation, Moscow decided to withdraw its troops. The Soviet Union was at that time in complete turmoil and would disintegrate some weeks later. The government was therefore more concerned with other, seemingly more urgent problems. But when, in 1994, the situation had calmed down, Moscow once again turned its attention to the rebellious republic in the North Caucasus that for three years had been de facto independent. Hoping to resolve the problem by a simple coup d’état Moscow supported, in November 1994, a rebellion by rival Chechen factions against the government of Dudayev. The putsch, however, failed and the Russian government, which denied being involved in the coup, was embarrassed by the fact that seven hundred regular Russian soldiers were among the captured rebels. After this humiliation Yeltsin decided to attack, and in the beginning of December 1994 Russian troops invaded Chechnya. Quite unexpectedly, however, these troops met with a fierce resistance.

The Russian government had totally underestimated the power of Chechen nationalism. This nationalism was the result of two factors. The first was the relatively late incorporation of the Chechen (and ethnically related Ingushi)[20] nation into the Russian empire. Chechnya was only incorporated in the 1860s, after a long and protracted colonial war of conquest that took more than thirty years. A second and even more important source of the Chechen drive for independence was the persecution of the Chechen nation by Stalin’s regime. On February 23, 1944, Red Army Day, Stalin deported the Chechen population for alleged treason. Four hundred thousand Chechens—old and young, men, women, and children—were put in trains and trucks and transported in the freezing cold of the barren winter to unknown destinations in Siberia, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan. A quarter of them, up to 100,000–125,000 Chechens, died in transit or after their arrival due to the harsh conditions.[21] It was an example of ethnic cleansing with clear racist undertones. Officially, however, racism was absent in the Soviet Union. Eric D. Weitz wrote:

Only in 1957, in the time of Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization, were the deported Chechens allowed to return to their home country. This deportation is deeply engraved in the Chechen national consciousness. Most of the Chechen leaders in the 1990s were born in exile. The gruesome Chechen fate, suffered at the hands of Stalin and his executioners, had fundamentally, and probably definitively, compromised any Chechen loyalty to the Russian state. “There is perhaps a special emotional state,” wrote Georgi Derluguian, “known only to the peoples that have been subjected to genocide in the past—the ‘never again!’ sentiment that reduces the whole world to the dilemma of survival. It provided the extraordinary determination and moral edge to the Chechen fighters in the first war.”[24] The Russians, however, never having come to terms with the crimes of their Stalinist past, had no understanding of the grievances of the Chechen nation.

CHECHNYA: RUSSIA’S WHIPPING BOY

A complicating factor was that the so-called Chechen question would soon become instrumentalized by the Russian power-elite for internal, political reasons. In the Duma elections of December 1993 Zhirinovsky’s Liberal Democratic Party had won 22.9 percent of the vote—which was much more than the 15 percent of Russia’s Choice, the pro-Kremlin party at that time. The writing was clearly on the wall for Yeltsin, whose popularity at that time was at a historical low and reached not even 10 percent. A victory for him at the presidential elections of 1996 was far from sure, and some even feared that the communist leader Zyuganov had a chance of being elected. Yeltsin’s advisers considered a quick victory in Chechnya would increase the ailing popularity of the incumbent president. The war plans, however, met with opposition in the army that had not yet digested its defeat in Afghanistan. Deputy Defence Minister General Boris Gromov openly declared himself against an intervention, and General Eduard Vorobyev, deputy head of the ground forces, refused to lead the invasion.[25]

Nevertheless Yeltsin issued on November 30, 1994, presidential decree No. 2137c, authorizing the invasion. This was a secret decree—which means that it was unconstitutional. On December 11, 1994, the day of the invasion, this decree was supplanted by another secret, and therefore equally unconstitutional, decree No. 2169c.[26] From the beginning, therefore, this war was unconstitutional. When the war did not turn out to be the easy walkover that was expected, opposition to the war escalated. Grozny was only captured at the end of February 1995, after three months of heavy fighting. When the Russians were confronted with many casualties during their first attacks on Grozny (it cost the lives of two thousand Russian soldiers), they started a carpet bombing of the city which led to an unprecedented massacre of the civilian population. According to eyewitness reports, “they continued to pound the rebel-held quarter [of Grozny] with thousands of guns, rockets, and bombs day and night…. To put the intensity of firing in perspective, the highest level of firing recorded in Sarajevo was 3,500 heavy detonations per day. In Grozny in early February, a colleague of mine counted 4,000 detonations per hour.”[27] The Russian army could have saved civilian lives by using precision-guided weapons, which they had in their arsenal. According to Gregory J. Celestan, “‘the word in the [Russian] higher command is that these highly advanced armaments were too expensive to be wasted’ in Chechnya and needed to be kept for more serious contingencies.”[28] One may doubt, however, that financial calculations alone were the reason for this indiscriminate bombing of a densely populated city. It seems to have been a deliberate choice with the goal to “bomb the Chechen population into submission.” The bombardments caused a hecatomb that took the lives of an estimated twenty-five thousand to twenty-nine thousand inhabitants—mostly civilians, especially older and disabled people and children, who had been unable to flee the city. As a point of comparison: the Allied bombardment of the German city of Dresden in February 1945 involved a civilian death toll of about twenty-five thousand people. This means that the bombardments of Grozny in the first months of 1995 were probably the most lethal attack on an open city in Europe since the end of World War II. This war was not even called a war. The Russian government pretended it was a “police action” (militseyskaya operatsiya) against a group of its own citizens. Bombarding an open city for months, causing a civilian death toll that equals that of Dresden at the end of World War II, and calling it a police action was not only extremely cynical, it was an outright criminal violation of human rights, and above all of the most basic human right: the right to life.

Despite the fact that Grozny and the other cities were occupied, and despite their heavy losses, the Chechens went on fighting. The war in Chechnya became more and more unpopular in Russia. Instead of promoting Yeltsin’s reelection, the war began to endanger it. On February 9, 1996, four months before the presidential election would be held, the Moscow correspondent of The Washington Post wrote: “President Boris Yeltsin acknowledged today that he cannot be reelected if Russia’s 14-month-old war against the separatist movement in Chechnya continues…. Many Russians have recognized that the war is an enormous liability for Yeltsin.”[29] On March 31, 1996, in a nationwide televised speech, Yeltsin presented a peace plan, consisting of an immediate ceasefire, the withdrawal of some Russian troops, and mediation with Dudayev. The peace plan received at that time much positive publicity on Berezovsky’s pro-Yeltsin TV channel ORT, which may have salvaged Yeltsin’s reelection. But in reality the fighting still went on, and, in August 1996, the Chechens even succeeded in recapturing Grozny. Finally, on August 31, 1996, Yeltsin’s envoy, General Aleksandr Lebed, signed a ceasefire with the Chechen commander, Aslan Mashkadov, in the Daghestani town of Khasavyurt. The Russians promised to withdraw their troops from Chechnya by the end of 1996 and to postpone a final decision on Chechnya’s status until December 31, 2001.

A GENOCIDE?

Thomas de Waal, an analyst who visited Grozny after the war, described the city in the following words:

Why this virulent, brutal overreaction by the Kremlin against a small mountain people? In a seminar organized by the Russian human rights organization Memorial that took place in Moscow in March 1995, shortly after the bombardment campaign on Grozny had started, one of the speakers, Nikolay Kandyba, already spoke of a genocide.[31] Another speaker, Mara Polyakova, attacked the criminal character of the war. She criticized the formulation of the presidential decree in which President Yeltsin had announced that the war would be conducted “with all the means that the government has at its disposal.”

Another participant, Vil Kikot from Moscow State Law Academy, referred to the historical relations between Chechnya and Russia, “in the light of which Russia must seem to be a cruel enemy to Chechens.”[34] He asked for what reason it was impossible for Chechnya to secede from Russia, and he referred to the peaceful secession of Norway from Sweden in 1905.[35] He could also have referred to another, more recent, example, such as Slovakia’s secession from Czechoslovakia. In this case not only did the secession take place in a peaceful way, but also the relative size of the territory and the population was much more important. Chechnya, with its surface of 19,300 square kilometers, occupies a little bit more than 1 percent of the territory of the Russian Federation, and its population of about 1.2 million is even less than 1 percent of Russia’s total population. Inga Mikhaylovskaya of the Russian-American Project Group on Human Rights stated “that the treaty character of the Russian Federation was illusory, since there is no clear legislative statement on the presence or absence of the right of [the] federative subject to leave the federation.”[36]

Sergey Kovalyov, a widely respected former dissident who was appointed by Yeltsin to chair the Presidential Human Rights Commission,[37] remarked that “a negotiated resolution of the crisis was also obstructed by the fact that the federal authorities did not take account of the historical role which Russia had played in the fate of the Chechen people.”[38] According to him, “the majority of Russians are not inclined to feel personal guilt [for what had earlier happened in Chechnya], and this, in my opinion, is a major obstacle on the path of our evolution toward a civilized civil society.”[39] It might be going too far, as did Kovalyov, to demand from the Russians to feel a personal guilt for what happened to the Chechens during the Stalinist era. One can only experience a personal guilt for one’s own deeds. The Russian population should, however, assume a collective, Russian responsibility for what has happened in the small Caucasian republic.[40] The reason why the Russian population was reluctant to assume a historical responsibility can be explained by two factors. The first reason would be its feeling of having been itself a victim of Stalin’s policies. The second reason would be its disenfranchised status: it never was a responsible subject of history, but rather a malleable object in the hands of authoritarian leaders. However, even taking these facts into consideration, the Russian citizens cannot deny that Stalin’s crimes were committed in their name.

On the eve of the second Chechen War, on September 8, 1999, Putin said: “Russia is defending itself. We have been attacked. And therefore we must throw off all syndromes, including the guilt syndrome.”[41] The reason why the Russian leadership did not assume any guilt or historical responsibility is different. Their denial was clearly functional. It had to do with the fact that in post-Soviet Russia Chechnya began to play an increasingly important role in Russia’s internal policy. The political elite acted upon the maxim that if Chechnya did not exist, it should have been invented. For Russian politicians Chechnya was the ideal Prügelknabe, the ideal whipping boy who could be used to consolidate their own grip on power. Sergey Kovalyov already clearly saw this role of the war in Chechnya.

Kovalyov also pointed to the central role of the FSB—the KGB’s successor organization—in starting the First Chechen War. The FSB was not only in the forefront before the war, but equally during the war. “In the early months of the intervention, up to early February 1995,” wrote Vicken Cheterian, “it was the generals of the FSB—the intelligence services—who were obliged to lead the military operations, with catastrophic consequences.”[43] An invisible red line connects, therefore, the war in Afghanistan with the first war in Chechnya, that is, the leading role of the KGB/FSB in instigating and conducting both wars. We will see in the next chapter how the spooks of the Russian secret services equally played an important role in the preparation of the Second Chechen War, which started as Yeltsin’s war, but was, in fact, Putin’s war.

The Second Chechen War was “Putin’s War.” This fact was immediately recognized by Sergey Kovalyov, who chose it as the title of an article for the New York Review of Books in February 2000.[1] Putin’s war would surpass the First Chechen War in cruelty, lawlessness, cynicism, and murderous violence. It would, additionally, become the longest war that was fought in Europe after the Second World War. There were, however, five important differences with the First Chechen War.

1. Unlike the First Chechen War, the Second Chechen War consisted of two phases, the first of which was the detonator of the second. The first phase was a secret war against the Russian population; the second phase was an open war against the Chechen population. The first phase consisted of an incursion of Chechen rebels into Dagestan in Russia proper and a series of apartment bombings in the Russian Federation of which Chechen militias were accused. However, soon allegations hinted at a possible implication of the FSB, the Russian secret service.

2. The war was given another ideological justification. The First Chechen War was still presented as a war against Chechen “separatists” or “bandits.” The Second Chechen War was presented as a war against “international Islamist terrorism.”

3. In the First Chechen War the Russian soldiers were almost exclusively conscripts. In the Second Chechen War, alongside conscripts, contract soldiers (kontraktniki) also were engaged. This could explain the increased ferocity of the violence against the civilian population.

4. The First Chechen War was, on the Russian side, fought mainly by ethnic Russian soldiers. In the Second Chechen War, however, the Kremlin, after some time, went over to a Chechenization of the conflict, in which Chechens fought Chechens. This policy of divide and rule not only secured Russia a “victory”—albeit provisional and still fragile—but it was an additional factor that contributed to the growth in violence against the civilian population.

5. When the First Chechen War started, Russia was not a member of the Council of Europe. It became a member only on February 28, 1996—one month before Yeltsin presented his peace plan that ended the First Chechen War. During the Second Chechen War, however, Russia was a fully fledged member of the Council and there was a flagrant contradiction between the humanitarian obligations required by the membership of this organization and the situation on the ground in Chechnya.

THE DETONATOR: A SECRET WAR AGAINST THE RUSSIAN POPULATION?

The official reason, given in September 1999 by the Russian government, which, at that time, was headed by prime minister Vladimir Putin, for starting the second war in Chechnya was a series of events. These events started with an incursion by the radical Chechen leader Shamil Basayev with two thousand armed men into the neighboring republic of Dagestan on August 8, 1999. This attack was followed by a series of terrorist explosions in apartment buildings in Buikansk, Moscow, and Volgodonsk in September. These explosions were immediately ascribed to Chechen terrorists. There remain, however, many unanswered questions concerning the Chechen incursion into Dagestan, as well as the apartment explosions, that cast doubt on the official version. From different sides, the Russian authorities have been accused of presenting an official version of the events that was, in effect, a smokescreen behind which another, darker and murkier reality was hidden. The Second Chechen War was presented by the Russian authorities as a spontaneous Russian response to an unexpected Chechen attack. However, the facts do not completely fit this narrative. Different authors suggest that, as in the case of the First Chechen War, the military attack was carefully planned within the Kremlin walls—only this time better.

When Yeltsin started the First Chechen War he had two objectives: first, to end the political instability in this region, and, second, to safeguard his reelection. The purpose of the Second Chechen War was to defend the interests of the Kremlin, especially of the “Family,” the group around Yeltsin’s daughter Tatyana Dyachenko. This group included oligarchs, such as Boris Berezovsky and Roman Abramovich, but also Aleksandr Voloshin, the head of the presidential administration, and his two predecessors Valentin Yumashev (who would marry Tatyana in 2002) and Anatoly Chubais. On May 25, 1998, Vladimir Putin was appointed first deputy head of the presidential administration. Three months later, on July 25, 1998, he became director of the FSB, the secret service. Putin was considered by the members of the Family to be one of them. He certainly was one of them, although he had his personal agenda.

PANIC IN THE FAMILY

In the spring of 1999 the Family had a sense of urgency that was bordering on panic. This time the situation was even more pressing than in 1994—before the start of the First Chechen War. Soon, in December 1999, there would be elections for the State Duma, followed by the presidential election in the spring of 2000. According to the constitution, Boris Yeltsin, having served two terms, would have to leave the Kremlin. This imminent change of the country’s leadership was extremely threatening. Yevgeny Primakov, who was appointed prime minister in September 1998 under the pressure of a hostile Duma, was working closely together with Yury Luzhkov, the mayor of Moscow. Both men had a good chance of winning the parliamentary elections in December. And one of them could become the next president. Primakov had already threatened to sue all oligarchs who illegally had enriched themselves. This happened at the same time as the Swiss authorities had opened an investigation into the so-called Mabetex affair. Mabetex was a construction company that was said to have paid $15 million in kickbacks to Yeltsin, his two daughters, and senior Kremlin officials, in order to receive a renovation contract for the Kremlin buildings. At the same time US investigators alleged that $10 billion in funds from Russia had been illegally deposited in the Bank of New York. It was suspected that part of it came from a $20 billion loan the IMF had paid to Russia since 1992 to stabilize the economy. Members of the Family were not only afraid that the new leadership would strip them of their newly acquired wealth, but—even worse—they feared that they could end up in prison. There were ominous signs on the wall. Russia’s highest investigator, Procurator General Yury Skuratov, had already begun a series of investigations that included the Mabetex affair and irregularities at Aeroflot and the Russian Central Bank, which were all connected with the Family.[2] It was in this context of a regime in panic that felt itself increasingly cornered, that the search for a suitable successor to Yeltsin began.

In his memoirs Yeltsin wrote about his attempts to find a suitable successor, where “suitable” meant a person who was capable and strong-willed, and at the same time trustworthy enough to give the Family a guarantee that its members would not be persecuted in the courts after Yeltsin would have left office. However, whether or not such a successor could be found in time was very uncertain. Therefore Yeltsin and the Family also prepared for a second option: to declare a state of emergency, disband the Duma, ban the Communist Party, and postpone the elections. On May 16, 1999, however, the option of such a Bonapartist coup d’état was dropped. On this day the Communist opposition in the State Duma failed to muster enough votes to start an impeachment procedure against Yeltsin. (One of the five charges against Yeltsin was, ironically, that he had started the first war against Chechnya.)[3] Immediately after the vote Yeltsin sacked Primakov as prime minister and appointed Sergey Stepashin, minister of the interior and former FSB chief, in his place. It seemed at first that Stepashin was Yeltsin’s ultimate choice for “Operation Successor.” But Yeltsin soon had doubts about the new man. “Stepashin was soft,” Yeltsin wrote in his memoirs, “and he liked to pose a bit. He loved theatrical gestures. I wasn’t certain he could hold out to the end or display that tremendous will and resolve needed in a fierce political battle. I couldn’t imagine a president of Russia without these tough character traits.”[4] Within three months Stepashin was sacked and, on August 9, 1999, he was replaced by the reserved and uncharismatic apparatchik Vladimir Putin.

Whatever option the Family would choose: a Bonapartist coup d’état or “Operation Successor”—in both cases an appropriate climate would have to be created in Russia: in the first case to justify a state of emergency, in the second case to boost the popularity of the Family’s presidential candidate.[5] And again—as in 1994—the Chechen option was chosen. At the end of March 1999 a meeting of the “power ministers” was held in which Sergey Stepashin, at that time still minister of the interior, Igor Sergeyev, minister of defense, Anatoly Kvashnin, head of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces, and Vladimir Putin, director of the FSB, participated.[6] They adopted a plan to intervene militarily in Chechnya. The original plan, considered in March 1999, was more modest than the one that would ultimately be chosen. It intended just “to seal Chechnya off” by creating a cordon sanitaire around the republic. The plan included the occupation of about one third of the Chechen territory north of the river Terek—but it did not include the capture of the capital, Grozny. Additionally, the border zone of Chechnya with Georgia would be occupied. In April the Russian Security Council approved this plan. At that point, this council had, for only a few days, been headed by Putin.

However, in May 1999—after the dismissal of Prime Minister Primakov, who had been critical of an intervention in Chechnya—this moderate plan would be changed and another, more radical plan adopted. This was a plan to reconquer the whole Chechen republic and bring it back into the Russian Federation. It is unclear how far these changes were affected by developments on the ground in Chechnya. Radical Wahhabists within the Chechen government, led by Shamil Basayev, convened, in April 1999 in Grozny, a Congress of the Peoples of Chechnya and Dagestan to discuss the unification of the two republics into a caliphate. In May a group of about sixty radicals crossed the border into Dagestan and wounded eleven servicemen and two policemen before retreating. This led to the first attacks by the Russian air force against radical positions in Chechnya since the first Chechen War.[7] However, it was clear that, in order to start an all-out war, a more serious casus belli had to be found.

A REAL OR CONSTRUCTED CASUS BELLI? THE ALLEGED CHECHEN ATTACK ON DAGESTAN

This casus belli was a second and more important incursion of Chechen rebels into Dagestan. A Chechen attack on another Caucasian republic that was—unlike Chechnya itself—an undisputed part of the Russian Federation, could not be accepted, and clearly justified a counterattack. On August 8, 1999, an incursion took place involving about one thousand Chechen fighters, led by the jihadist rebel leader Shamil Basayev and his Saudi ally, Umar Ibn al-Khattab, leader of the foreign mujahideen in Chechnya. The Kremlin immediately declared Russia to be under attack by international terrorism. Yeltsin sacked Prime Minister Stepashin and, on August 9, appointed Putin as his successor. He indicated that he considered Putin a worthy successor to become the next Russian president. The Chechen attack on Dagestan was presented by the Russian authorities as a complete surprise. But how spontaneous and “unexpected” was this Chechen attack? In early August 1999, just after the incursion took place, the investigative Russian weekly Versiya published a report alleging that, some time before the incursion into Dagestan,[8] the head of Yeltsin’s presidential administration, Aleksandr Voloshin, had purportedly met in France with Shamil Basayev. The meeting allegedly took place in a villa on the Côte d’Azur, which belonged to a Saudi citizen, Adnan Khashoggi, a rich international arms dealer with a dubious reputation. The meeting was, allegedly, arranged by a middleman, Anton Surikov, a retired officer of the GRU (Glavnoe Razvedivatelnoe Upravlenie), the intelligence service of the Russian army. Surikov and Basayev would have known each other and would even have been on friendly terms since 1992, when they fought together on the side of Abkhazia in the war against Georgia. In this period Shamil Basayev, his brother Shirvani Basayev, and their Chechen fighters worked closely together with the GRU. They were even trained by this organization. “There is little doubt,” wrote Martin Malek, “that Basayev worked together well with [the] Russian secret services in Abkhazia (where Basayev’s men are said to have played soccer with the heads of killed Georgians).”[9]

The reason behind this secret meeting on the French Riviera would seem to have been that—however implausible this might seem at first sight—the Kremlin and Shamil Basayev shared parallel interests. Basayev was a Wahhabi jihadist who wanted to establish a Caucasian emirate in the North Caucasus. He was a fierce opponent of the Chechen President Aslan Maskhadov, a moderate Chechen nationalist, who considered Basayev’s expansionist jihadism a danger to Chechnya’s independence. A small war was in Basayev’s interests, because it would destabilize Mashkadov and at the same time enhance Basayev’s status inside Chechnya, opening up political prospects. The Kremlin equally urgently needed a small victorious war in its “Operation Successor.” In the alleged meeting on the French Riviera the Russian side is thought to have promised that there would be no real resistance in Dagestan (as a matter of fact some weeks before the conflict the Russian border troops would be withdrawn from Dagestan’s borders—to the great surprise of the local authorities). It would be a “Potemkin war,” a quasi-war, a theatrical, hardly serious armed exchange, so that in the end both sides could claim victory.[10] Are these allegations of a secret understanding between Basayev and the Kremlin true? We don’t know, because until today definitive evidence is lacking. It is clear, however, that if Basayev had trusted a Russian promise that the conflict would remain restricted to a theatrical skirmish, he would have fulfilled for the Kremlin the role of a “useful idiot.” After the Chechen incursion into Dagestan Putin immediately declared an all-out war as an answer to the Chechen provocation.

STORM IN MOSCOW

But would Basayev’s attack on Dagestan be enough to trigger a wave of public anger in Russia? For the average Russian citizen the events in Dagestan were far from home and certainly had nothing to do with daily life in a country that was just recovering from the deep financial crisis of 1998. It was clear that in order to succeed, “Operation Successor” had to be accompanied by more powerful measures. Then, suddenly, in the first weeks of September 1999, in the Russian Federation there began a series of terrorist attacks. On September 4, a massive bomb exploded at a military housing complex at Buikansk in Dagestan, killing eighty-three people. On September 8 and 13 there followed explosions in working-class apartment buildings in south Moscow, leaving 228 people dead. On September 16 a truck exploded in the southern town of Volgodonsk. These explosions were real massacres. Hundreds of Russian citizens—men, women, children—were killed, dismembered, and maimed, when bombs, placed by unknown criminals in the basement of the apartment buildings, exploded. The explosions always took place early in the morning to kill a maximum of victims. In just a few weeks over three hundred people were killed and over one thousand wounded. The wave of terrorism led to widespread panic and fear in the population. And for everybody it was clear who was the culprit: it was the work of Chechen terrorists.

A STRANGE “EXERCISE” BY THE FSB

Then something strange happened. On the evening of September 22, 1999, a bus driver, returning home in Ryazan, a city about 130 miles southeast from Moscow, saw two suspicious-looking men carrying big sacks into the basement of the apartment building where he lived. On the license plate of their car was pasted a piece of paper with the number 62, the region code of Ryazan. The man immediately called the police, and when the policemen arrived they discovered in the basement three 50 kg sacks of a white powder. The sacks were connected to a detonator, batteries, and a clock with the timer set for 5:30 next morning. Immediately thirty thousand residents in the neighborhood were evacuated. The sacks contained the highly explosive substance hexogen that had also been used in the previous bombings. The local police, analyzing mobile telephone calls that were made immediately after the event, arrested two men in connection with the terrorist attempt. To the great surprise of the policemen, the two suspects showed ID cards of the secret service FSB. It took the FSB some time to react. But on September 24 FSB chief Nikolay Patrushev announced that it had only been an exercise to test the vigilance of the police and the population. The substance of the sacks, identified by experts as hexogen, was said to have been just ordinary sugar. This version, however, was contested by Yury Tkachenko, the explosives expert who had defused the bomb. In an interview in February 2000 with Pavel Voloshin, a journalist of the paper Novaya Gazeta, Tkachenko insisted that the vapors coming from the sacks had been analyzed by a sophisticated gas analyzer and that the device had clearly indicated the presence of hexogen. Also the detonator was a professional one, one that was used by the army.[11] According to the paper Kommersant an explosion in the twelve-floor building in Ryazan would have killed about 240 people.[12]

FORESIGHT OR LEAKED INFORMATION?

Other strange things happened in this period—even before the wave of explosions started. There were, for instance, two Western journalists, who—quoting anonymous sources—announced the events two months before they actually took place. On June 6, 1999, Jan Blomgren, the Moscow correspondent for the Swedish paper Svenska Dagbladet, wrote that one option being considered by the Kremlin and its associates was “terror bombings in Moscow which could be blamed on the Chechens.”[13] A similar statement was made by Giulio Chiesa, the Moscow correspondent for the Italian paper La Stampa, who wrote an article in the Literaturnaya Gazeta of June 16, 1999, with the title Terroristy tozhe raznye (There are also different kinds of terrorists), indicating that terrorist methods can be used, not only by rebel groups, but also by governments.[14] In a second article, written after the explosions, Chiesa emphasized the plausibility of the latter option, pointing to the extreme professionalism of the terror attacks. According to him, for the nine explosions that were planned the terrorists needed more than two tons of hexogen and “in Russia hexogen is produced only in a factory in Perm, in the Urals,” which would mean that “tons of explosives disappear from a top-secret factory and circulate throughout Russia.”[15] Chiesa also stressed the fact that the explosives “were positioned in an extremely professional way, under the bearing structures of the buildings, in such a way as to make them collapse like a house of cards.”[16]

Not only these two foreign correspondents, but also Russian journalists predicted with unmatched foresight the coming events, hinting at involvement of the highest political authorities. On July 22, 1999, Aleksandr Zhilin published an article in the Moskovskaya Pravda with the title Burya v Moskve (Storm in Moscow).[17] In this article Zhilin wrote that “the city is awaiting great shocks. The performance of loud terrorist acts (or attempts at terrorist acts) is being planned involving a number of government establishments: the buildings of the FSB, MVD [Ministry of the Interior], the Federation Council, the Moscow City Court, the Moscow Arbitration Court, and a number of editorial boards of anti-Luzhkov publications.”[18] In a second article, published after the bombings, Zhilin wrote that he possessed a leaked document on which his first article was based. He said he had showed the document to the deputy premier of Moscow and to colleagues from the TV: “Everyone said that this could not be true,” he wrote. “Today I understand that those journalists who rejected even the theoretical possibility of the existence of a plan of destabilization in Moscow, one that included terrorist acts, were reasoning like normal, decent people. They could not understand in their minds how, for the sake of some political goals, someone could commit such barbaric acts.”[19]

Another Russian journalist, Yelena Tregubova, who had close contacts with the Kremlin at the time, wrote that, as early as September 1998—this is one year before the apartment explosions took place—the head of the presidential administration, Valentin Yumashev, warned her “that we have received secret information from the special services that the country finds itself on the eve of mass rebellions, in essence on the verge of revolution.”[20] Tregubova considered this an indication that a “Storm” scenario had already been envisaged. It is clear that the real truth could not emerge in this climate of rumors, predictions, alleged leaked documents, and so-called exercises in which FSB agents were caught while putting sacks of sugar in the basement of an apartment building. There was only an “official” truth, and this truth was that Chechen terrorists were responsible for these acts. Sophie Shihab, at that time the Moscow correspondent for the French paper Le Monde, returned later to these dramatic and fateful weeks. She wrote about a young French businessman with close contacts with Berezovsky, who had called the bureau of Le Monde in Moscow in September 1999. “On the telephone,” wrote Shihab, “he has lost his considerable self-assurance and renounces his friend: ‘Boris is announcing more attacks. He has gone mad. It is finished, I’m having nothing more to do with him. He must think that by creating chaos he can put his strong man into power.’”[21] Strange? But there were other strange things that happened in this period, although it would take two and a half years before these emerged in the press.

One of these strange things was the fact that Gennady Seleznev, the speaker of the Duma, was informed of the explosion in Volgodonsk three days before the explosion actually took place.[22] It happened on September 13, 1999, during a session of the Duma and LDPR leader Vladimir Zhirinovsky told how it happened: “Somebody from the secretariat brought a note. Clearly they had called to warn the speaker about such a turn of events. Seleznev read us the news on the explosion. Thereafter we waited for announcements about the event in Volgodonsk on the TV news. But when this only happened three days later, I was the only one who asked the speaker about it at the plenary session of September 17, 1999.”[23] Seleznev did not answer: he simply turned Zhirinovsky’s microphone off. When, in October 1999—after the war had started—a Russian GRU officer, Aleksey Galtin, was captured by the Chechens, the man declared on a video, received by The Independent: “I know who is responsible for the bombings in Moscow (and Dagestan). It is the FSB, in cooperation with the GRU, that is responsible for the explosions in Volgodonsk and Moscow.”[24] The Russian authorities immediately claimed that this confession had been made under torture and contained no truth. But after his return to Russia, Galtin repeated his version of the facts in an interview with the opposition paper Novaya Gazeta, and this time he could not be accused of making his statement under pressure.

Another clue hinting at the involvement of the FSB was an open letter, published on March 14, 2005, in the Novaya Gazeta. The open letter was written by Achemez Gochiyaev, a native of Karachaevo-Cherkessia in the North Caucasus, who was sought by the police in connection with the apartment bombings.[25] Gochiyaev told how, before the bombings, he had been contacted by a certain Ramazan Dyshekov, a former classmate, with a business proposal to sell mineral water. In order to stock the water, the other had told him, it was necessary to rent basements in apartment buildings in Moscow and Ryazan. After the second explosion in Moscow Gochiyaev sensed he had been trapped, suspecting that Dyshekov was an FSB agent. He called the police and gave the addresses of other buildings where basements were rented. That is how other explosions in Moscow were able to be prevented. In his open letter Gochiyaev accused the FSB of having organized the Moscow bombings and Dyshekov of being an FSB agent. He asked for an independent, international investigation.

THE DUMA INVESTIGATION COMMISSION

In such a serious situation, in which there are allegations that a government has used state terror against its own citizens, one would expect a government to do anything to clear its name and remove any doubt. “The idea that the secret services might have had something to do with the apartment bombings evoked indignation in Putin,” the Moscow Times wrote. “To even speculate about this is immoral and in essence none other than an element of the information war against Russia,” he was quoted as saying.[26] By qualifying investigation as speculation and speculating as immoral, Putin obviously wanted to block any serious investigation into the facts. The problem, however, was that the facts that had emerged revealed so many unsolved problems and contradictions that they only strengthened the rumors of involvement of the government and the secret services. A government that has nothing to hide would be anxious that a thorough and impartial investigation would take place, in which the investigators would be given full, complete, and unrestricted access to all documents and to any further information that they deemed relevant. However, it was not the government, but the Duma that established an investigation commission in 2002. On July 25, 2002, the members of the Duma Commission organized a teleconference from Moscow with Alexander Litvinenko, Yury Felshtinsky, and Tatyana Morozova, who were in London. The first two were the authors of the book FSB vzryvaet Rossiyu (translated in English with the title Blowing Up Russia), in which they accused the FSB of being behind the apartment bombings.[27] The president of the Duma Commission, Sergey Kovalyov (the former president of Yeltsin’s Presidential Human Rights Commission), complained that the government did not give the information requested and was hiding itself behind “state secrets.”[28]

Secrecy and lack of cooperation on the part of the authorities was not all. It soon became clear that it was extremely dangerous to air critical opinions on the events. One example was Duma member Sergey Yushenkov of the party Liberalnaya Rossiya (Liberal Russia). In March 2002, after the news emerged that Duma speaker Seleznev had been informed of the Volgodonsk explosion before it took place, Yushenkov declared “that the episode with the note seems still further proof of the involvement of the FSB in the explosions that took place in Moscow and Volgodonsk in the autumn of 1999.”[29] Yushenkov was gunned down and killed at the entrance of his Moscow apartment block on Thursday evening, April 17, 2003.[30] A colleague of the victim, Liberal Russia member Yuly Rybakov, who would later investigate the bombings, speculated in the Moscow Times “that Yushenkov could have been killed for his attempts to show that the security services were guilty of a series of apartment block bombings in 1999.”[31] A similar assessment was made by Arkadi Vaksberg, who himself was a member of the commission. “In fact,” wrote Vaksberg, “Yushenkov has clearly paid for his uncompromising position on the Chechen war, he knew without doubt the persons who were really responsible for the apartment explosions in Moscow.”[32] A late and intriguing testimony on Yushenkov’s death was made in 2010 by Marina Salye, a member of the St. Petersburg Duma, who, in the early 1990s pushed for Putin’s resignation as the city’s deputy mayor after implicating him in a multimillion-dollar kickback scheme. She said “that she decided she needed to lie low after receiving a fright while visiting a colleague, State Duma Deputy Sergei Yushenkov, with whom she was hoping to forge a political alliance in the early part of 2000. ‘We were going to cooperate politically. I always had good relations with Sergei Nikolayevich…. When I came to his office, I saw a person there who I didn’t want to see anytime, anyplace, under any circumstances. I’m not going to reveal his name. But I then understood it was time to go. And Sergei Nikolayevich was soon killed.’”[33]

The apartment of the journalist Yelena Tregubova was bombed on February 2, 2004, after the publication of her book Tales of a Kremlin Digger. She escaped a certain death only because, having already left her apartment, she returned for a few minutes. It was at that precise moment that the bomb exploded outside her front door.[34] The former KGB colonel, Alexander Litvinenko, who, together with Yuri Felshtinsky, wrote the critical book on the apartment bombings with the title Blowing Up Russia, was poisoned in London in November 2006 with the radioactive substance polonium 210, a substance which one must assume can only be procured from a government agency. Litvinenko’s suspected murderer, Andrey Lugovoy, a former KGB bodyguard, fled to Russia. He was offered a seat in the Duma by Zhirinovsky’s Liberal-Democratic Party, thereby getting parliamentary immunity that prevented him from being extradited to Britain. The murder of Litvinenko prompted the journalist Yelena Tregubova to leave Russia and ask for political asylum in Britain. Another victim was probably Yury Shchekochikhin, a Duma deputy for the liberal Yabloko party, member of the anti-corruption commission of the Duma, and deputy editor-in-chief of the opposition paper Novaya Gazeta. It was Shchekochikhin who initiated the 2002 Duma investigation into the apartment bombings. He died on July 3, 2003, after two weeks of agony. There were grave suspicions that he was poisoned, but this suspicion could not be verified because the results of his autopsy were classified a “medical secret.”[35] Even his relatives never received an autopsy report and “when they tried to initiate criminal proceedings, their request was denied.”[36]

YELTSIN ON THE APARTMENT BOMBINGS

In his memoirs Boris Yeltsin referred to the rumors that the secret services may have been involved in the apartment bombings.

Yeltsin wrote these words in 2000. However, the investigations of the Duma Commission, established two years later, were prematurely halted because of lack of cooperation on the part of the government, and thirteen years later still no Chechen terrorist has been tried for the apartment bombings. The whole affair has been declared a state secret by the authorities, and the many—too many—strange events and unexplained circumstances that point to an alleged involvement of the secret services, far from having been investigated exhaustively, have been subject to a cover-up. According to a report by Amnesty International, “the responsibility for these attacks [in Moscow and Volgodonsk] should rather be sought on the part of the FSB. Until today the question of Russian state terrorism remains still open. The Russian secret services, at that time, seem to have set in motion a sinister scenario of a power change in the Kremlin against the background of explosions.”[38] Arriving at a similar conclusion, Arkadi Vaksberg, member of the Duma investigation commission, wrote: “Murders and attempted murders that, judging by the traces they left behind, had been ordered by the Kremlin and the Lubyanka [FSB], happened, one after the other, [they were] sometimes of a surprising scale and cruelty: I’m thinking especially of the apartment explosions at the eve of the election of our beloved president.”[39] David Satter expressed himself even more clearly. He wrote: “Both the logic of the political situation and the weight of the evidence lead overwhelmingly to the conclusion that the Russian leadership itself was responsible for the bombings of the apartment buildings. This was an attack in which many of the victims were children whose bodies were found in pieces, if at all. There can be little doubt that persons capable of such a crime, regardless of how they present themselves, would not give up power willingly but would react to a threat to their position by imposing dictatorial control.”[40]

The Second Chechen War started on September 22, 1999. On this day Russia began an aerial campaign over Chechnya, which was followed by a ground invasion at the beginning of October. Almost ten years later, on April 16, 2009, the Russian government officially declared the war to be over and won—although there was still some fighting going on. The war took almost a decade, roughly the same time as the war in Afghanistan. The war in Chechnya, however, was not called a war, but a kontrterroristskaya operatsiya, an “anti-terrorist operation,” or KTO. This second war would be fought in an even more violent and ruthless way than the First Chechen War. On the Russian side there existed a clear urge to take revenge and punish the Chechen people for the lost first war. It led to an all-out war with little or no respect for the rules of war or for human rights, least of all the right to life of the Chechen civilian population. The actions of the Russian army can be listed under six headings:

• Bombardments

• The use of contract soldiers (kontraktniki)

• The conduction of sweep operations (zachistki)

• The installation of so called filtration points

• Forced disappearances

• Chechenization

BOMBARDMENTS: THE MASSIVE SLAUGHTER

In the First Chechen War the Chechen capital Grozny was heavily bombed for months, which led to a death toll second only in recent European history to the death toll of Dresden during World War II. In the first war also the Russian army suffered important losses. In the second war the Russian commanders had learned the lessons of the NATO actions in Kosovo some months before. Their new strategy was this: bomb until victory and conduct a war at distance without heavy casualties. The NATO war against Serbia, however, relied on a strategy of precision bombardments and the availability of smart weapons that minimized collateral damage and victims in the civilian population. Such a strategy, however, was lacking in the Second Chechen War. “Collateral damage in Chechnya was of little interest to the Russian public and to international audiences (aside from human rights organizations, which had little influence in Russia), and consequently Moscow did not take them into account.”[1] According to the Russian defense expert Pavel Felgenhauer,

The effects of these fuel bombs are described as follows:

The Russian forces also used “Tochka” and “Tochka-U” ballistic missiles. These missiles have a radius of 120 km and on impact can cover up to 7 hectares with cluster shrapnel. According to Felgenhauer, “the use of such mass-destruction weapons as aerosol (fuel) munitions and ballistic missiles against civilian targets was undoubtedly authorized by Moscow and may implicate the President Putin personally, as well as his top military chiefs, in war crimes.”[4] According to Jacob Kipp, an expert on the Russian army at the University of Kansas, the Russian army has certain peculiarities that make it more prone to commit war crimes than Western armies. “The Russians have a tradition in which every war is a ‘total war.’ …When the decision has been taken to start a war, there is no feeling for the fact that there can be limits and should be limits how this war is conducted.”[5] The Russians call this situation bespredel, which literally means “without limits.” It implies torture, cruelty, and gratuitous acts of violence which remain, as a rule, unpunished.

The civilian death toll in Grozny was not as massive as in the winter of 1994–1995. This was due to the fact that many inhabitants, remembering what happened in the first war, fled to the neighboring republics, especially to Ingushetia. During the bombing campaign 250,000 civilians, more than a quarter of the total Chechen population, crossed the border. However, restricting the civilian death toll seemed not to be a top priority for the Russian government. Emma Gilligan has given an extremely precise and horrifying account of the failure of the Russian government to provide safe evacuation routes out of the war zone. “The failure to evacuate the capital,” she wrote, “became the most symbolic event. This was the decisive moment when the Russian government unashamedly revealed that it was prepared to subject the civilian population of Chechnya to a massive bombing campaign in order to take back the capital.”[6] On December 6, 1999, the Russian armed forces dropped leaflets on the city, demanding that civilians still remaining in Grozny leave within five days or face destruction. At that moment fifteen to forty thousand civilians were still trapped in the city. “The crude logic was that fifteen to forty thousand civilians, if unable to move out of fear for their personal safety, or because of age, physical illness, or lack of financial means, might well be sacrificed for the defeat of several thousand separatist fighters.”[7] The imminent bombing campaign on the most vulnerable citizens led to an international outcry, which put enough pressure on the Russian authorities to open—although belatedly and reluctantly—two evacuation routes. “The failure to evacuate the civilian population,” wrote Gilligan, “constituted one of Russia’s deepest failures of principle and leadership, in both the first and the second wars in Chechnya. This failure… reaffirmed a growing consensus among many civilians that they were being targeted as part of a larger campaign of racial destruction.”[8]

KONTRAKTNIKI: THE CRIMINAL VOLUNTEERS

The First Chechen War was fought with badly trained conscript soldiers with low morale, who, despite the superiority of their weapons, were often no match for the highly motivated Chechen fighters. For this reason the Russian army introduced—alongside the conscript soldiers—a new kind of soldier, the contract soldier or kontraktnik (plural: kontraktniki). These kontraktniki had, as a rule, a contract for six months and were very well paid by Russian standards, receiving 800 rubles, or approximately $25 per day.[9] Most of them were demobilized soldiers from the former Soviet armed forces, who joined Private Security Companies (of which over twelve thousand were registered). The most well-known of these was the Moscow-based Alpha firm, founded by former KGB Spetsnaz (Special Forces) personnel, which is connected to the international ArmorGroup firm.[10] What interests governments is the fact that

This risk became a fateful reality in the Second Chechen War. The introduction of kontraktniki had a deep impact on the character of this war. Conscript soldiers were certainly no innocents or angelic young lads. They included the average number of sadists that can be found in the general population. But the great majority of them were normal guys, mostly from modest provincial homes, trying to uphold a minimum of decency amidst these events. The kontraktniki were of another kind. According to Pavel Felgenhauer, “many kontraktniki enlisted, but the process of screening volunteers for Chechnya was superficial and they were sent into combat without any further selection or training. Many of these volunteers have been drunks, bums and other fallouts of Russian society.”[13] The contract soldiers were not given military uniforms. Soon they developed their own private dress codes: “the bandanas [pirate’s scarves], the fox tail hanging down the back of the neck, singlet tops, sunglasses, and tattoos—all of these were emblems of their status and self-aggrandizement.”[14] Thomas de Waal, who actually met them at checkpoints in Chechnya, described them as follows: “They were often ex-criminals with tattoos along their arms and bandannas [sic] on their heads, creatures more of gangland than a modern European army—and no friends to journalists.”[15] The contract soldiers soon got the reputation of brutal killers, but also of thieves who openly carried out their robberies from people’s homes.[16]

ZACHISTKI: THE PURGES

Together with the Special Forces (Spetsnaz) the kontraktniki would play a leading role in sweep operations by the Russian army in occupied territory, the so-called zachistki. These operations were sometimes conducted at night or early in the morning, sometimes also during the day. The army would encircle a village and hermetically seal it off from the outside world. Thereupon small groups of six to nine men enter the village and conduct street-by-street searches of homes. There were no official witnesses, no search warrants, and the faces of the soldiers were, as a rule, covered by masks or blackened to avoid identification. For the same reason the registration plates of the military vehicles were covered. Hiding their identity was a priority for these troops to carry out the most hideous acts. The official reason for these sweep operations was to control the identity papers of the Chechen population and to identify members of “illegally armed formations.” But in practice these zachistki degenerated into summary executions, torture, arson, and looting. A notorious case was that of the village of Novye Aldy on February 5, 2000, when soldiers threw grenades into basements full of civilians and set houses alight with the inhabitants still inside.[17] During the same operation fifty-six civilians were summarily executed. The word zachistka became one of the Russian catchwords in the winter of 1999–2000. In December 1999 the weekly Moskovskie Novosti published a list with “words of the year.” The word zachistka was number one on the list.[18]

Emma Gilligan has analyzed how the word zachistka made its way into the Russian media.

The resemblance to the Serb word etnicko ciscenje (ethnical cleansing), coined in the wars of the former Yugoslavia some years earlier, was, indeed, striking. Not only because of its etymological origin, but also because of its meaning. Another linguistic root of zachistka is the Russian word chistka, which means purge. Stalin’s repression in the 1930s in which hundreds of thousands of party members, intellectuals, and kulaks were liquidated was called Velikaya Chistka (Great Purge). The word zachistka therefore evokes a double association: on the one hand with the practices of ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia, on the other hand with the purges of Russia’s Stalinist past. We should, however, not forget that ethnic cleansing, especially of nonwhite Muslim peoples, has old historical roots in Russia. John Dunlop, for instance, reminds us that “in May 1856, Count Kiselev, minister of state domains, informed officials in the Crimea that Alexander [tsar Alexander II] was interested in ‘cleansing’ (Kiselev used the verb oshishchat’) Crimea of as many Tatars as possible.”[21] That the tsarist empire was interested in annexing foreign lands, but not in annexing foreign peoples, was expressed by the famous remark of a tsarist minister that “Russia needs Armenia, but she has no need of Armenians.”[22]

In 2005 the Russian human rights organization Memorial estimated the total death toll of civilians due to the zachistki between two thousand and three thousand.[23] But the zachistki were not only murderous events, they were equally economic events. They were well organized looting operations. Oleg Orlov, one of the leaders of Memorial, wrote that “these operations are usually accompanied by crimes against the local population. Robberies on a mass scale are the most common and basic form of war crime. This doesn’t just mean that the troops or police take people’s money. These are organised operations in which, quite openly, right in front of the local population, people’s property is loaded onto trucks or armoured personnel carriers. This is not just a matter of a few undisciplined soldiers and clearly sanctioned by the officers. For the military, it’s a business.”[24] Corruption and looting were widely accepted and had become quasi-institutionalized practices for the rank and file, as well as for the officers, who had become “war entrepreneurs.” For them the war had become a means of personal enrichment. This commercial aspect of the war in Chechnya has also been stressed by Herfried Münkler, who wrote that “the war in Chechnya is conducted by both sides in such a way that it is no longer clear where the dividing line is between acts of war and normal criminal violence.”[25] This war criminality merges with a wider criminality, because “in the end the actors in these wars make many contacts with international organized crime to sell the booty, trade illegal goods, or to buy weapons and ammunition.”[26] What is alarming in the Chechen case is that these criminal acts were not committed by irregular, disorganized fighters in a faraway and obscure failed state, but by the special troops and the regular army of a great European power, which is a member of the Council of Europe.[27]

FILTRATION POINTS: HIDING TORTURE

Immediately linked with the zachistki was the installation of so-called filtration points (filtratsionnye punkty). These were temporary detention points. They were installed as an answer to national and international protests against torture practices in the official detention center in Chernokozovo. In the decentralized and ad hoc organized filtration points these torture practices could continue, but were no longer hindered by critical witnesses. “Torture was a routine practice at the temporary filtration points,” wrote Gilligan. “Unlike at Chernokozovo, torture was practiced in specially equipped wagons, in tents, or in fields. The torture wagons were the ultimate symbol of impunity—they were linked to neither a legal detention point nor possible witnesses. The most common forms of torture practiced included the following: electric shocks to the genitals, toes, and fingers with a field telephone…; asphyxiation with plastic bags; cutting off ears; filling mouths with kerosene; setting dogs on the legs of the detained; knife cuts; and carving crosses in the back of detainees.”[28] In 2000 there were about thirty filtration points in operation where somewhere between ten and twenty thousand detainees were held.[29]

FORCED DISAPPEARANCES AND BLOWING UP DEAD BODIES

Sweep operations by masked men, temporary filtration points set up for a few weeks, one week, or even a few days, in an empty factory hall, a school, a tent, or a bus, gave the torturers carte blanche, free from the risk of being disturbed by witnesses. The Russian Special Forces that were involved showed an extreme need for secrecy. There was, first, the need to hide one’s own identity; second, to hide the identity of the army unit or government agency one belonged to; third, there was the need to hide the acts one was committing; and, fourth, and last but not least, there was the need to hide the results of these acts. This brings us to another feature of this war that fully justifies the name it was given by Anna Politkovskaya: “A Dirty War.”[30] The sweep operations in the first year of the war led to mass executions of civilians. When, later, mass graves were discovered, it was possible to establish the identity of a number of the bodies. The dead body of an executed civilian, discovered in a mass grave, was the material proof of a war crime. Even if the perpetrators of the crime could not be identified (and the police and judicial instances were not very cooperative in identifying, finding, and prosecuting them), there always remained a certain risk of being identified later.

This led to a new practice. People started to disappear. They were taken away from their homes by armed, masked men in armored patrol vehicles, and their families were not informed where they were being held or what had happened to them. By 2002 the disappearance rate was more than a hundred civilians per month.[31] According to estimates by Amnesty International, published in 2010, between three thousand and five thousand people had disappeared since the beginning of the Second Chechen War. They added, however, that the actual number would be higher, due to the fact that, in the generalized climate of fear, not all cases had been reported to the police.[32] Mass graves, when they are discovered, are embarrassing facts for the perpetrators. To conceal the killings of abducted people the perpetrators took care, therefore, to have the corpses disappear also. “Blowing people up, dead or alive… is the latest tactic introduced by the federal army into the conflict,” wrote the correspondent of The Guardian in October 2002. “It was utilised perhaps most effectively on 3 July [2002] in the village of Meskyer Yurt, where 21 men, women and children were bound together and blown up, their remains thrown into a ditch. From the perspective of the perpetrators, this method of killing is highly practical, it prevents the number of bodies from being counted, or possibly from ever being found.”[33]

In 2003 blowing up corpses had become a systematic practice. “[R]esidents and human rights campaigners say fragments of blown-up bodies are being found all over the war-ruined region. Rather than put a stop to human rights violations, the military appears to be doing its best to hide them, critics say…. Lawmaker and rights campaigner Sergei Kovalyov theorizes that the intent is to make it difficult for independent investigators to connect the corpses to the soldiers who allegedly arrested them.”[34] Stalin has been credited with the phrase “no person, no problem” (net cheloveka, net problemi). Stalin liquidated his problems by liquidating the people. In Chechnya the Russian Special Forces cynically changed Stalin’s adage into “no corpse, no problem.” “The analogies to Argentina’s ‘dirty war’ were by no means unfounded,” wrote Gilligan. “The tactics grew increasingly reminiscent of those of Jorge Videla’s military government from 1976 to 1983.”[35] During Videla’s dictatorship, between nine thousand and thirty thousand people disappeared. During vuelos de la muerte (death flights) many were pushed out of planes into the Atlantic Ocean and the Rio de la Plata. The same happened in Chechnya, but over land. One of the Russian soldiers interviewed by Maura Reynolds told her: “We also threw rebels out of helicopters. It was important to find the right height. We didn’t want them to die immediately. We wanted them to suffer before dying.”[36]

According to Article 1 of the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance, adopted on December 20, 2006, by the General Assembly of the United Nations, “1. No one shall be subjected to enforced disappearance. 2. No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification for enforced disappearance.” Article 2 states that “for the purposes of this Convention, ‘enforced disappearance’ is considered to be the arrest, detention, abduction or any other form of deprivation of liberty by agents of the State or by persons or groups of persons acting with the authorization, support or acquiescence of the State, followed by a refusal to acknowledge the deprivation of liberty or by concealment of the fate or whereabouts of the disappeared person, which place such a person outside the protection of the law.” Article 5 states that “the widespread or systematic practice of enforced disappearance constitutes a crime against humanity.”[37] Equally, Article 7, Paragraph 1 (i) of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court defines the enforced disappearance of persons as a crime against humanity. The crimes committed in Chechnya, the site of such “widespread and systematic practice of enforced disappearance,” unambiguously fall under the definition of both the UN Convention and the Rome Statute that determine them to be crimes against humanity.

THE PROCESS OF CHECHENIZATION

In October 1999 (then) Prime Minister Putin promised that the war in Chechnya would be short and casualties would be low. It would be the Chechens themselves, he said, not the Russians who would be fighting the bandits and terrorists. Pavel Felgenhauer commented: “It actually seemed at times that Richard Nixon was back, talking of the ‘Vietnamization of the war.’”[38] The Chechenization, announced by Putin, was, indeed, another difference with the First Chechen War. The second phase—in which local Chechen allies of the Russians would play an increasing role—began on October 5, 2003, when Imam Akhmad Kadyrov (the father of the present leader Ramzan Kadyrov) was installed as president by the Russian government. It had a profound impact on the way the war was conducted. In all the villages Kadyrov’s men had their local informers. The sweep operations could therefore become more focused. From now on zachistki became adresnye zachistki: targeting only selected addresses. Consequently, the number of victims gradually decreased. The struggle of Chechens against Chechens, however, was not less violent, but it lacked the clear racist undertones that characterized the Russian offensive of the first two years.

Jonathan Littell, a French-American author and winner of the prestigious French literature prize Prix Goncourt, who worked in Chechnya for a humanitarian organization in the 1990s, revisited Chechnya in 2009. He was impressed by the totally rebuilt center of Grozny.

Littell saw modern restaurants, a pharaonic new mosque, named after Akhmad Kadyrov, the president’s father, which is an exact copy of the famous blue mosque of Istanbul, and a reconstructed orthodox cathedral with glittering golden onion-shaped towers. The main boulevard, the Prospekt Pobedy (Victory Boulevard) had been rebaptized into Prospekt Putina (Putin Boulevard). “One could almost say, without exaggeration, that Paris seems to keep more traces of the Second World War,” wrote Littell, “than Grozny of its two conflicts.”[40] Chechnya’s president, Ramzan Kadyrov, whose father Akhmad was killed in April 2004, is Putin’s special protégé. He reigns as a sultanist, oriental despot, and his feared militia, the kadyrovtsy, maintains a climate of terror.[41] The system holds only because of the “special relationship” between Kadyrov and Putin. Ramzan’s regime, however, shows the limits of Putin’s Chechenization. As more and more former separatist fighters side with Ramzan, “there is an aspect of Ramzan’s policy that is [for the Russian authorities] a subject of great concern: the massive cooptation of former independentist fighters.”[42] Should Ramzan disappear, this feudal structure based upon the personal loyalty of the Chechen leader to Vladimir Putin, could break down and Moscow would be confronted with some twenty thousand heavily armed Chechens. When, on April 16, 2009, Moscow decreed the official end of the kontrterroristicheskaya operatsiya (KTO) in Chechnya, it was a victory especially for Ramzan Kadyrov, who had acquired an almost complete autonomy by declarations of loyalty. According to the Russian political commentator Sergey Markedonov, “beginning in 2003, the Kadyrovs, first father and then son, in fact had succeeded in pushing out the federal presence from the republic. Slowly, step by step, but consistently.”[43] And Charles King and Rajan Menon observed: “there are persistent worries in Moscow that he [Ramzan Kadyrov] has built his own state within a state—offering a model for how savvier Chechens, Circassians, and others might one day gain the kind of de facto autonomy, perhaps even independence, that previous generations failed to win.”[44]

The “victory” proclaimed by the Russian government in the spring of 2009, after having formally ended the war, soon turned out to be a pyrrhic victory. Not only because Moscow was gradually losing its grip on Kadyrov—a fact that Russian analysts also recognized[45]—but because the conflict began to spill over into the neighboring republics of Dagestan and Ingushetia, where a ruthless guerilla war was raging. “The [Chechen] conflict has splintered and metastasized,” wrote Foreign Policy four months after the official “end” of the war in Chechnya.[46] Also Chechnya itself was far from being pacified. This became clear from a report by Thomas Hammarberg, the Human Rights Commissioner of the Council of Europe. Hammarberg wrote that in Chechnya in 2009 an increase in terrorist acts, murders, and abductions could be observed in comparison with 2008.[47] The most famous case was the murder of Natalya Estemirova, representative of the human rights organization Memorial, who was kidnapped and murdered on July 15, 2009. Despite the harsh repression rebel forces remained active. On August 29, 2010, a surprise attack took place on the house of Ramzan Kadyrov in his home village Tsentoroi, followed by a suicide attack on the Chechen Parliament on October 19. The first attack was called by a Russian commentator “out of the ordinary,” because “this latest attack strikes a blow at the very heart of the Caucasus vertical power structure.”[48] And he added that “the attack on Tsentoroi has shown the vulnerability of the Kadyrov regime, which many consider the most successful in the North Caucasus.”[49] Kadyrov’s vulnerability shows at the same time, behind the apparent strength of the Kremlin’s “power vertical,” the vulnerability of Putin’s regime. Interviewed on the situation in the Caucasus by the French paper Le Monde the well-known Russian analyst Lilia Shevtsova said that “everything in the region is getting out of control. We find there a non constitutional entity, Chechnya. Nobody talks about it, but it is a real humiliation for the federal authorities. You have there a feudal and ‘sultanist’ regime, which means: clannish and authoritarian, that is supported by money from Moscow…. It produces resistance in the young generation against this regime and against the federal forces. The terrorist attacks take place almost on a daily basis.”[50]

THE WAR IN CHECHNYA AND THE EUROPEAN COURT OF HUMAN RIGHTS

A final difference between the First and the Second Chechen War was that during the second war the Russian Federation was a fully fledged member of the Council of Europe, one of the most prestigious intergovernmental human rights organizations in the world. Russia had become a member on February 28, 1996, when the First Chechen War was beginning to unwind. One would have expected that the council would have condemned the war crimes committed in Chechnya, but, unfortunately, the reaction of the Council of Ministers of the Council of Europe was rather muted. Apart from a temporary suspension of its voting rights in the Parliamentary Assembly for some months in 2000, Moscow escaped any sanction.[51] The European Court of Human Rights, however, was still able to play an important and useful role, because a rapidly growing number of cases of Russian—also Chechen—citizens was brought before the jurisdiction of the court. In the beginning of 2007, 19,300 allocated applications against the Russian Federation were pending, which represented 21.5 percent of all cases from all forty-seven member states. By the end of the same year the total number of cases against Russia was over 20,000 and represented 26 percent of the total. By the end of 2008 the total number of cases against Russia had grown further to 27,246, which was 28 percent of the total.[52]

The European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg was, for Chechen citizens, a court of last resort to correct the corrupt judiciary in Russia. The majority of the cases have been won by the plaintiffs. On January 26, 2006, Russia was for the first time condemned for a case of torture.[53] The Russian authorities obediently paid the fines, but they refused to change the judicial system according to the obligations Russia had accepted when it became a member of the council. Because the European Court of Human Rights abstained from obliging the Russian government to open new judicial inquiries, punish the perpetrators, and present public excuses to the family, this has led to a cynical system—resembling the medieval salic law (lex salica)—in which, in the case of a condemnation a kind of “tax” is paid by the Russian state to the families of the victims who had been killed. As a rule, “the disappearance of a human being costs 35,000 euros.”[54] Although for the plaintiffs these rulings are “better than nothing,” they do not really restore their violated sense of justice. As concerns ordinary Russians, for them the Strasbourg rulings are only another proof of Europe’s negative feelings towards Russia. “Europe,” wrote the pro-Kremlin paper Pravda, “has always disliked Russia, but has never been straightforward about it. Just google: ‘European court in Strasbourg Chechens’ and you will see how many cases against Russia have been won. Many of those cases are based on doubtful facts.”[55] There is another side to the coin: the flood of complaints is totally disrupting the court in Strasbourg, which is drowning under the overload of cases. Attempts, however, to reform the court to make procedures more efficient were blocked by Russia. Its own solution to diminish the flow has been to exert a growing pressure on the lawyers of Russian and Chechen plaintiffs, who are harassed by the authorities to discourage citizens from seeking justice in Strasbourg.

A GENOCIDE?

The Second Chechen War was characterized by an endless series of crimes, many of which certainly deserve to be qualified as war crimes and crimes against humanity: from the indiscriminate bombardments of Grozny and the use of forbidden fuel and cluster bombs in the first months of the war, to the summary executions of civilians during the zachistki, the torture, the forced disappearances, the blowing up of bodies, the organized looting, and other acts of state terror. Another important question is whether the Russians committed genocide. There are no precise data available for the number of people killed, only estimates that vary according to the sources. Uwe Halbach wrote in February 2005—this is four years before the official end of the “counterterrorist operation”—that according to estimates, “between 10% and 20% of the population of Chechnya died in both wars, so after 1994. For the first war the numbers vary between 35,000 and more than 100,000 victims…. As concerns the second war…, in the late summer of 2002 human rights organizations calculated the [number of] victims in the Chechen population at 80,000 dead.”[56] Five years later Jonathan Littell gave for both wars a total number of two hundred thousand victims.[57] According to another author, “figures range to 300,000 killed,” adding that this “is probably an exaggeration.”[58] The last figure, apparently, does not take into account the refugees who fled the republic, whose numbers could reach one hundred thousand. It seems plausible, therefore, to estimate the total number of killed Chechens in the two conflicts between 150,000 and 200,000. These include men, women, and children, the great majority of them noncombatant citizens. Before the first war started the population of Chechnya was roughly one million. This means that possibly between 15 to 20 percent of the Chechen population has been exterminated.[59] To put this number in a historical perspective: Daniel Goldhagen has estimated that “Pol Pot [killed] the highest percentage of the inhabitants of any country, more than 20 percent of the Cambodians, totaling 1.7 million.”[60] Pol Pot was, indeed, a ruthless mass murderer. And the number of people killed by his regime is tenfold of the Chechens killed in Chechnya. But the percentage of the population killed in these two cases, by Pol Pot on the one hand, and by the masters of the Kremlin on the other, are quite comparable. The question of a genocide committed by Russia in Chechnya is therefore fully on the table.

Of course there is the famous question of intent that, according to international conventions, must be proven in order that an act can qualify as genocide. Did the Russian government intentionally kill such a great proportion of the Chechen population? This cannot be proven as long as there are no records (texts of the orders given by the political leadership to the military commanders, minutes of the Security Council of the Russian Federation, etcetera) that provide undisputable proof. But is such a proof necessary? Daniel Goldhagen denies this requirement. According to him, “intent should not be a criterion for determining what instances qualify as genocide.” And he added: “If a large number of people, except through defensible military operations, are eliminated in any manner, why should this not be part of a study of genocide, which rightly becomes a study of mass murder, which rightly becomes a study of mass elimination?”[61]

It is quite clear that in Chechnya such a large number of people could not have been eliminated “through defensible military operations.” If one estimates the total number of Chechen fighters in both wars at around fifteen thousand to twenty thousand, this means that for each killed Chechen fighter the Russians killed nine to ten Chechen civilians. This indiscriminate mass killing of civilians cannot, under any circumstance, be qualified as collateral damage. The human rights activist Sergey Kovalyov wrote in February 2000, during the bombing campaign of Grozny:

Goldhagen is quite clear on the Chechen case. “States and their leaders often give tacit support, remain silent, or make quiet pro forma objections when allies or other important countries commit mass murders or eliminations. Aside from a few tepid and oblique objections, this has characterized virtually every state’s stance toward the Russians’ mass murdering and vast destruction in Chechnya.”[63] The likelihood of members of the Russian government being pursued for war crimes and crimes against humanity is not great. The juridical instruments, however, are in place. On the table is an important verdict of the European Court of Human Rights in the case of Akhmadov and others v. Russia. This concerns an attack on October 27, 2001, by Russian soldiers, firing from helicopters on people, harvesting in the fields near the village of Komsomolskoye. The court decided that the attack violated article 2 of the Convention (right to life). In the explication of the verdict the court spoke of an “armed conflict” in Chechnya. This was the first time the court used the expression “armed conflict.” In all former verdicts the court had spoken about the “repression of an armed rebellion.” Amnesty International has stressed the importance of this verdict: “to agree that in Chechnya exists an armed conflict is of great importance for the international legal and penal qualification of human rights violations. The existence of an armed conflict is the necessary condition for the application of norms concerning war crimes that, let us remember, are imprescriptible.”[64] Another hopeful initiative was the adoption of a resolution on April 2, 2003, by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) asking for the establishment of an international tribunal for crimes committed in Chechnya. Unfortunately, this initiative remained without follow-up.[65]

It is disappointing that—apart from condemnations by the European Court of Human Rights—the alleged war crimes committed by Russia in Chechnya have met with so little protest from the international community, especially from nearby Europe. This lack of interest can certainly be explained. Not only was the war considered an internal affair of the Russian Federation, but the West also believed (or wanted to believe) the Russian propaganda that the war in Chechnya was a part of “the global war on Islamist terrorism.” The West’s failure to react—and especially Europe’s failure to react in the framework of the Council of Europe—was a disgrace. The war crimes committed in Chechnya—repulsive and criminal as they were in themselves—were also a warning for the West about Russia’s eventual future behavior. Michael Ignatieff wrote: “Even when a state’s domestic behavior is not a clear and present danger to the international system, it is a reliable predictor that it is likely to be so in the future. Consider the example of Hitler’s regime, 1933–38, or Stalin’s in the same period. In hindsight, there seems no doubt that Western governments’ failure to sanction or even condemn their domestic policies encouraged both dictators to believe that their international adventures would go unpunished and unresisted.”[66]

After the War in Georgia, Vaclav Havel and other prominent personalities, wrote an op-ed in which they argued that “a great power always finds pretexts to invade a neighbor whose independence it does not accept. Let us remember: Hitler accused the Poles of being the first to have opened fire in 1939 and Stalin held the Finns responsible for the war he started against them in 1940. The fundamental question is to know which is the occupied country and which is the occupying country, who has invaded whom, rather than who has fired the first bullet.”[1] We should keep these words in mind when analyzing the events which took place in Georgia in August 2008.

A FIVE-DAY WAR?

The Russian version of the war in Georgia is as follows: on the night of August 7, 2008, Georgian troops entered the breakaway province of South Ossetia and launched a surprise attack on its capital, Tskhinvali. During the attack the Georgian troops killed two thousand civilians: a clear case of genocide. Many of the victims were Russian citizens. In addition, Russian peacekeepers, stationed in South Ossetia, were killed. To stop this genocide Russian troops started a “humanitarian intervention.” They entered South Ossetia and Abkhazia, the other breakaway province, to drive the Georgian aggressors back. This version of the facts was not only broadcast nationwide by the Russian media and disseminated by Russian diplomats abroad, it was personally explained by Vladimir Putin to US President George W. Bush, who were both attending the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games in Beijing on August 8.

This official Russian narrative, however, was a prime example of active disinformation, a deception method of which the Russian secret service is the unrivaled champion. When the war began the Kremlin immediately launched cyber attacks against Georgia and effectively blocked the websites of the Georgian government and the Georgian media. In so doing it was able to impose its own version of the events from the very start of the conflict. It even managed, with considerable success, to influence Western public opinion. Most correspondents of Western media in Moscow accepted uncritically the Russian narrative “that the war started with a Georgian attack, which was followed by a Russian response.” The only criticism to be heard was concerning the “disproportionate” character of the Russian response, a euphemism for the massive attacks outside South Ossetia and Abkhazia on the Georgian heartland and the destruction of the military and economic infrastructure of the country.[2] The Russian disinformation campaign was very successful. It is telling that even Pavel Baev, an analyst who could never be accused of being naïve vis-à-vis the Putin regime, wrote on August 11—one day before the ceasefire: “[the Russian] surprise was so complete that Putin, according to those who saw him in Beijing, was pale with barely controlled rage, which he tried to convey to U.S. President George Bush and Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev.”[3] For this interpretation of the facts Baev referred to a Russian source. A similar version of the facts could be found in a report by a European think tank, published some weeks after the war. In this report it was stated that “Moscow has responded to Saakashvili’s military attack on South Ossetia by escalating a conflict over a secessionist region into a full-scale inter-state war with Georgia.”[4]

Does this interpretation of the Russian war against Georgia as a Russian response, provoked by a Georgian aggression that led to a genocide, stand up to the facts? No, it does not. This war, far from being—as most media at the time wanted to believe—a reckless act, initiated by an impulsive Georgian president, was a carefully planned operation. It had been prepared by the Russian leadership since 2000 through a process of gradual and purposive escalation. Step by step this process was implemented and brought to its final dénouement in August 2008. If we want to analyze this war and the factors that led to it we should, therefore, analyze its complete history and this history does not start on August 7, 2008, but in the year 2000. That we take this choice of start date is no coincidence, because it is the same year in which Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin was elected president of the Russian Federation. From this point Russia’s Georgia policy changed radically, although not particularly in terms of its objectives. These remained generally the same as at the beginning of the 1990s. These objectives were to divide Georgia and undermine its viability as an independent and sovereign state. The active military support given by Russia to separatist movements during the civil wars in South Ossetia (1991–1992) and Abkhazia (1992–1993), as well as its support for the corrupt autocrat Aslan Abashidze in Adjara (Southwest Georgia) until his forced resignation in 2004, had no objective other than to weaken Georgia. Plans to incorporate Abkhazia into Russia already existed in the 1990s, as became clear from a remark made by Pavel Grachev, then Russian minister of defense, who told Georgian President Eduard Shevardnadze: “We can’t leave Abkhazia, because then we’d lose the Black Sea.”[5] Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote shortly after the civil wars: “In Georgia, military intervention gave Moscow the pretext for political mediation. In the course of it Georgia learned… that Russia as an umpire is not very different from Russia as an empire.”[6]

With the arrival of the new strongman in the Kremlin it was the strategy, not the objectives, that changed. This strategy was no longer based on ad hoc initiatives and on blocking solutions aimed at reintegrating the breakaway provinces into Georgia. From this point on there was a well-organized long-term planning. Every single step was deliberately calculated in advance, and a war with Georgia became an option. After the war with Chechnya, the war with Georgia became Putin’s second war of choice. Contrary to the official Kremlin version that insists on calling the war in Georgia a “Five-Day War,” three different phases in this conflict can be discerned:

• the period of a Russian-Georgian cold war (December 2000 to spring 2008)

• a period of a lukewarm war (spring 2008 until August 7, 2008)

• the hot war (August 7–August 12, 2008)

THE RUSSIAN-GEORGIAN COLD WAR: THE PASSPORT OFFENSIVE

The Russian-Georgian Cold War started in December 2000, when the Russian government imposed visa requirements for Georgians who worked in Russia—an unfriendly measure that was directed against the thousands of Georgian citizens who worked in Russia and sent remittances to their relatives at home. Georgia was the first and only CIS country for which visas were introduced. Moscow said the measure was necessary to prevent Chechen rebels from entering Chechnya via Georgian territory. This decision, taken in the first year of Putin’s presidency was the first sign of a more aggressive stance toward Georgia. In 2002 this anti-Georgian policy entered a new phase when the Russian authorities started distributing Russian passports on a wide scale to the inhabitants of Abkhazia and South Ossetia.[7] This “passport offensive” made it clear that Moscow’s intention was to “thaw” the frozen conflicts in Georgia and then resolve them in a way that suited Moscow’s interests. By creating a majority of “Russian citizens” in the two breakaway provinces Russia seemed to be preparing these provinces for some form of integration into Russia. Ronald Asmus wrote:

Some observers dubbed this policy “re-occupation through passportization.”[10] The EU-sponsored “Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on the Conflict in Georgia,” headed by the Swiss diplomat Heidi Tagliavini, was also very clear on the illegal nature of Russia’s passport policy, reporting that “the issuance of passports is an act based on governmental authority. To the Mission’s knowledge, the passports were in many cases distributed on the territory of the breakaway entities. To the extent that these acts have been performed in Georgia without Georgia’s explicit consent, Russia has violated the principle of territorial sovereignty.[11]

But it was not only Russian passports that were distributed. The de facto deputy minister of Foreign Affairs of Abkhazia, Maksim Gvindzhia, declared on September 6, 2006, that at that point roughly 80 percent of the population held a dual Abkhaz-Russian citizenship.[12] This means that the Abkhaz government had already started to distribute its own—illegal—passports two years before its independence was recognized by Russia.[13] Because holders of Abkhaz passports could obtain a dual Russian-Abkhaz citizenship (which gave Abkhaz citizens the right to receive Russian pensions and to travel to Russia without restrictions),[14] it became clear that from 2006 Russia was conducting a double track strategy, leaving both options open: either the independence for Abkhazia, or its incorporation into the Russian Federation. The extent to which these options even remained open after the August 2008 war, emerged from declarations by the presidents of the two breakaway provinces on September 11, 2008. According to the Russian news agency RIA Novosti, “South Ossetian President Eduard Kokoity said his republic planned to merge with the neighboring Russian province of North Ossetia, and become part of Russia, a statement he later withdrew [apparently under pressure from the Kremlin, MHVH]. Meanwhile, Abkhaz President Sergei Bagapsh said Abkhazia would not pursue to obtain ‘associated territory’ status with Russia, but would seek to join the post-Soviet Commonwealth of Independent States and the Russia-Belarus Union State.”[15]

In December 2001 Eduard Kokoity replaced the more moderate South Ossetian independentist President Lyudvig Chibirov. Kokoity was Moscow’s man. A former Komsomol apparatchik and ex-Soviet professional wrestler, Kokoity was accused of links with organized crime.[16] As a member of Aleksandr Dugin’s revisionist International Eurasianist Movement that propagated the reintegration of former parts of the Soviet Union into the Russian Federation,[17] he was never interested in any negotiated compromise with Tbilisi. For Moscow, Kokoity was the right man in the right place to block, definitively, the eventual reintegration of South Ossetia into Georgia, opting for a solution that would make the secession of the region permanent.

It is important to note that this aggressive strategy by Russia toward Georgia started in the years 2000–2002. It was, therefore, neither a reaction to the Rose Revolution nor to Georgia’s aspirations for NATO membership: during those years the Georgian president was Eduard Shevardnadze and not Mikheil Saakashvili, and the Rose Revolution had not yet taken place. Also a Georgian NATO membership was not on the political agenda. After the Rose Revolution in 2003, however, the relationship rapidly deteriorated. When, on September 27, 2006, Georgia arrested four Russians diplomats suspected of espionage for the GRU, the Russian military secret service, and extradited them some days later, the Kremlin launched a full-scale economic and diplomatic war. It was a case of pure and deliberate overkill. Russia suspended all air, rail, and road traffic between Russia and Georgia, including the postal services. It stopped issuing visas to Georgians and imposed import bans on Georgian wine and mineral water. Putin declared “that Georgia’s home and foreign politics was similar to that conducted by KGB during Stalin’s times,”[18] which is a surprising remark for a former KGB agent who has never hidden his deep personal pride in being a Chekist. The economic blockade was accompanied by a vehement anti-Georgian campaign within the Russian Federation, targeting the approximately one million Georgians who lived and worked in the country. Georgian businesses in Moscow were raided; illegal immigrants were hunted and expelled. The Russian action clearly constituted a “racist campaign,” wrote Salomé Zourabichvili, who was Georgian foreign minister from 2004 to 2005. “[It was] apparently supported by the official authorities, [and took] the form of a “hunt for the Caucasian” in the streets of Russia’s main cities.”[19] The Moscow police asked schools to provide lists of children with Georgian names in order to check out their parents. The government sponsored raids on Georgian migrant workers and market traders soon started to give off a whiff of ethnic cleansing, which led the independent radio station Ekho Moskvy (Echo of Moscow) to start a campaign asking their listeners to wear a badge with the slogan Ya Gruzin (I am a Georgian).[20]

THE LUKEWARM WAR: RUSSIAN PROVOCATIONS AND PREPARATIONS FOR WAR

The second phase, the “lukewarm war,” started soon afterward. In his famous Munich speech of February 10, 2007, Putin had already announced a harder stance toward the West. This was followed by Russia’s first direct military aggression against Georgia one month later, when Russian military helicopters shelled Georgian administration buildings in the Kodori Gorge, a mountainous part in Upper Abkhazia that was still under the control of the Georgian government. However, when shortly after this aggression Russia proposed the closure of its 62nd military base in Akhalkalaki, a small town in South Georgia near the frontier with Armenia, this raised hope in Georgia that the situation would improve. On June 27, 2007, ahead of schedule, the Russians finished the withdrawal of their troops. Andrey Illarionov, a former Putin aide, later turned into a regime critic, said that this unexpected and seemingly cooperative attitude on Russia’s part was, in fact, an integral part of the Russian war preparations. “While it may seem counter-intuitive,” wrote Illarionov, “it became clear in hindsight that Moscow wanted to avoid a situation in which Georgia [in an eventual war] could take Russian bases hostage.”[21] The decree, signed by Putin on July 13, 2007, in which he announced the suspension of the Treaty on Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE) by December 12, 2007, should be viewed in the same light. When this treaty was signed, it was hailed as “the basis for overall European and North American security, and derivatively, world security, for many decades to come.”[22] Through the treaty the objective of “eliminating the capability of launching a surprise attack [was] completely realized.”[23] An example of an attack that was supposed to be excluded in the future was the “combined-arms surprise attack in Europe like the Nazi blitzkrieg at the beginning of World War II.”[24] Putin, however, unilaterally “suspended” this treaty, a step that was not foreseen in the treaty text.[25] Although the other signatories still continued to apply the CFE Treaty, Putin, in fact, had killed it. He killed it deliberately. Since Russia was no longer bound by the provisions of the Treaty, Putin could remove the limits on the deployment of Russian heavy military equipment in the North Caucasus, thereby giving Russia a free hand to start a war against Georgia.

On March 6, 2008, Russia took another unilateral step when it lifted the sanctions on Abkhazia that had been agreed by the Commonwealth of Independent States in 1996. It was Russia’s answer to the declaration of independence by Kosovo in February 2008, and it would be the opening shot in the war of nerves between Russia, with its South Ossetian and Abkhazian proxies, and Georgia. It was, however, after the Bucharest NATO summit of April 2–4, 2008, that Russia’s Cold War against Georgia really began to warm up. Without a doubt the refusal of France and Germany to grant Georgia (and Ukraine) a Membership Action Plan (MAP) during the summit was instrumental in Russia adopting a more aggressive stance toward its small neighbor, whose vulnerability had been suddenly exposed after being snubbed by these two leading EU countries.[26]

In hindsight, it was after the Bucharest summit that the preparations for a military confrontation began in earnest. President Mikheil Saakashvili had already warned that this would happen. “If we don’t get [the MAP],” he said, “that’s exactly when they [the Russians] are going to start all kinds of troubles.”[27] He was proved to be right. The NATO summit affirmed that Georgia and Ukraine would, one day, “become members of NATO.” “But because the summit did not provide for a mechanism to achieve this purpose, explicitly rejecting the Membership Action Plans that would fulfill this function,” wrote David J. Smith, “Putin read NATO’s fudge for what it was. In other words, the West will continue its dalliance without seriousness of purpose.”[28] “NATO’s failure to approve a Georgian MAP at the April 2008 summit,” wrote Vladimir Socor, “emboldened Russia to escalate military operations against Georgia.”[29] The lifting of the sanctions against the breakaway regions was followed by a decree by President Putin in April 2008 instructing the Russian government to cooperate with the de facto authorities in Abkhazia and South Ossetia and to recognize some documents issued by them.[30] It was the first official step made by Russia to recognize the two breakaway entities. The new relationship, established by Russia with these provinces after April 2008, “was virtually identical to that which existed between Moscow and the federal territories within Russian proper. Georgia noted that Putin’s order amounted to Russia’s full annexation of the two Georgian regions.”[31] An imminent annexation was also revealed by the presence of high-ranking Russian FSB officers in the South Ossetian “government.”[32]

The Russian political analyst Alexander Golts wrote: “Tbilisi had every reason to consider what had happened as a preparation for annexation.”[33] One of the consequences of the lifting of the sanctions was that it legalized the theft by Russians of Georgian property: “Russians have been investing, especially in real estate along the coast, though much of this property belonged, before the 1990s war, to Georgians who have not been able to return and for whom no compensation mechanism exists.”[34] Mart Laar, former prime minister of Estonia, wrote an alarming article in the Financial Times. He spoke about “a creeping annexation” and warned: “This will incorporate the two territories into the Russian legal space.”[35] He added: “Ignoring Moscow’s Soviet-style land-grab would intensify strife in the south Caucasus.” “In 1937,” Laar warned, “Hitler agitated for the rights of the Sudeten Germans in Czechoslovakia; in 1938, he annexed Sudetenland into the Reich, purging it of non-Germans. In Abkhazia, most Georgians, Armenians, Estonians, Greeks and Russians—perhaps 500,000 in all—are already gone.” He concluded: “Western political autism is irresponsible. The west must awake and unite, not to oppose Russia or support Georgia, but to stand up for its ideals.”

Nobody, however, listened. US President George W. Bush, in the last year of his presidency and extremely unpopular, was a lame duck, and the leading European states let economic interests prevail over uncomfortable principles. During the same period the Kremlin strengthened the self-declared “governments” of the breakaway provinces by bringing in more of its own people. An important appointment was that of the Russian General Vasily Lunev, a former deputy commander-in-chief of the Siberian Military District. On March 1, 2008, he became minister of defense of South Ossetia, a region with only sixty thousand inhabitants. In normal conditions this would have been more than a degradation: rather an exile. In this case, however, in view of the coming war, it was an important promotion. And on August 9, 2008, General Vasily Lunev’s secret real function became clear, when he was appointed commander-in-chief of the 58th Army of the North Caucasian Military District, the army that led the invasion into Georgia.[36]

A new step in the process of escalation was taken on April 20, 2008, when a Georgian Israeli-made Hermes-450 reconnaissance drone was shot down above Abkhazia. The Russian government attributed this act to “Abkhaz militias.”[37] This explanation was ridiculed by Novaya Gazeta journalist Yuliya Latynina, who wrote, “Apparently, in the near future small, but proud Abkhazia will have its own space armies.”[38] The Georgian government was able to produce video evidence of the attack that was filmed by the unmanned drone seconds before it was shot down. It showed a Russian MiG-29 fighter attacking the drone with a missile and then flying back in the direction of Russia. Russia said the video was a fake, but a UN report, published one month later, concluded that the video evidence was authentic.[39] In the same week in which the drone was shot down, Pavel Felgenhauer reported that “Sergei Shamba, the head of [the] Abkhazian foreign ministry, made a statement about the intention of capturing part of Georgian territory for making a certain ‘buffer zone.’ Apparently, it is planned to banish local population from there.”[40] These aggressive declarations hinting at further annexations of Georgian territory coupled with ethnic cleansing of the inhabitants were accompanied by accusations at the address of Georgia that Georgia prepared an attack. Georgia’s “aggressiveness” was also used as a pretext for transferring on April 29, 2008, an additional Russian military contingent of what were called mirotvorcheskie sily (peacekeepers) to Abkhazia. Felgenhauer commented: “People in the Staff of airborne troops stated that it’s not ‘additional peacemakers,’ but a battalion of 400 soldiers with regular ammunition, including heavy material, anti-aircraft means and artillery (which is not allowed for peacemakers) that was brought into Abkhazia without any prior arrangement with the Georgian side.”[41] This move was a flagrant violation of the 1994 cease-fire agreement that had ended the war between Georgian and Abkhaz fighters.

On May 31, 2008, a further step on the escalation ladder was taken when four hundred soldiers of Russia’s railway forces illegally entered Abkhazia and started to repair the railway connection between Sukhumi, Abkhazia’s capital, and Ochamchire in south Abkhazia, near the frontier with Georgia proper. The railway along the Abkhazian coast connects Abkhazia in the North with the Russian town of Sochi. It is the only railway connection linking Georgia with Russia. The official reason given for this troop activity was a ruling by the—newly elected—Russian president, Dmitry Medvedev, “on rendering humanitarian aid to the republic.”[42] NATO Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer pronounced the deployment to be “clearly in contravention of Georgia’s sovereignty and territorial integrity,” and “an escalating action by Russia.”[43] He said the troops should be withdrawn. The Georgian government indicated the real reason for the repairs: the preparation for a Russian attack on Georgia. “Nobody needs to bring Railway Forces to the territory of another country, if a military intervention is not being prepared,” declared Georgian Deputy Foreign Minister Grigol Vashadze.[44] Due to the poor road system the Russian army, as a rule, transports its troops and tanks by rail. The troops finished their work at the end of July, only a few days before the war started.

In July Russia further increased the pressure. On July 3, 2008, an assassination attempt was made on Dmitry Sanakoev, head of the Tbilisi-backed interim administration of South Ossetia, which still controlled about one third of the territory, including some villages north of the separatist capital Tskhinvali. Throughout the month of July new incidents took place.

For informed observers it was clear that the wheels of war were turning. On July 5, 2008, a publication in the Russian online paper Forum.msk.ru titled “Russia is on the verge of a great Caucasian war,”[46] quoted Pavel Felgenhauer, who predicted the outbreak of a war with Georgia. “The most important fact is,” Felgenhauer said, “that around Putin’s circle the decision has already been taken to start a war with Georgia in August.” The chief editor of the paper, Anatoly Baranov, just returning from the North Caucasus where he had spoken with Russian officers stationed in Rostov-on-Don, wrote: “The army wants to fight…. They see in the war the solution to internal political problems, the consolidation of the nation, a purge of the elites, in general everything that is positive.”[47] On August 3, four days before the outbreak of the war, the Georgian internet portal Gruziya Online (Georgia Online), wrote that five battalions of the Russian 58th Army had passed through the Roki tunnel, a 6-kilometer tunnel that is the only direct road connection between Russia and South Ossetia.[48] The same day the Russian deputy minister of defense, Nikolay Pankov, was in Tskhinvali and conducted secret talks with the separatist South Ossetian “President” Kokoity and other leaders of his government. An even more disquieting fact, reported by the Internet paper, was that the evacuation of women and children from Tskhinvali had begun. Four thousand people were said to have been evacuated. When Kokoity was asked about it, he “declared that they had not evacuated the children, but sent them on holiday.”[49] A few days later, on August 7, the master of this announced war, Vladimir Putin, was to board the plane in Moscow to attend, together with other world leaders, the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games in Beijing.

THE HOT WAR: AUGUST 7–12, 2008

On August 7, 2008, the day the war started, the situation was so tense that only a spark was needed to set Georgia afire. There have been discussions afterward over who actually fired the first shot. It was clearly in Russia’s interests that this first shot should be fired by Georgia so that the Russian aggression could be presented as a defense. In the EU-sponsored Tagliavini Report, published on September 30, 2009, the opening of the hostilities was attributed to Georgia. “It is not contested,” wrote the authors of the report, “that the Georgian armed forces started an armed offensive in South Ossetia on the basis of President Saakashvili’s order given on 7 August 2008 at 23.35.”[50] The report confirmed, however, that at the very moment the hostilities started, troops from the regular Russian army—troops that were not part of Russia’s peacekeeping forces—were already present in South Ossetia, that is, on Georgian soil. They were there illegally, without permission from the Georgian authorities. This fact came on top of prior violations of Georgian sovereignty, such as the passport offensive and the provocative flights of Russian fighter jets over the Georgian airspace. The incursion of Russian regular troops (and irregular troops in the form of Chechen and North Ossetian fighters coming from Russia) into South Ossetia, together with tanks and heavy weapons, was a violation of Georgian sovereignty of a totally new, and extremely menacing kind. In fact it constituted as such a casus belli.

Different authors have tried to reconstruct the chain of events leading to the outbreak of war. In this chain of events there are at least six events that should be considered. They are, separately, and taken together, a clear indication of Russia’s preparations for war. These events are as follows:

1. A cyber war, launched by Russian servers before the outbreak of the hostilities, paralyzing Georgian government websites. This cyber war must have been prepared well in advance.

2. The huge Kavkaz-2008 military exercise conducted near the Georgian border just before the outbreak of the war.

3. The evacuation of the population of the South Ossetian capital Tskhinvali before the war.

4. The surprising presence of a huge group of about fifty Russian journalists from the most important Russian press media and TV stations in Tskhinvali two days before the war began.

5. The active preparation for participation in the war by Cossack militias from Russia before the outbreak of war.

6. The incursion of regular Russian troops into South Ossetia before the outbreak of war.

According to Wesley K. Clark and Peter L. Levin, “Russia has already perpetrated denial-of-service attacks against entire countries, including Estonia, in the spring of 2007—an attack that blocked the Web sites of several banks and the prime minister’s Web site—and Georgia, during the war of August 2008. In fact, shortly before the violence erupted, Georgia’s government claimed that a number of state computers had been commandeered by Russian hackers and that the Georgian Ministry of Foreign Affairs had been forced to relocate its Web site to Blogger, a free service run by Google.”[1] In the case of Georgia this would mean that the Russian cyber war already started before the hostilities began.

The Russian 58th Army is Russia’s main military force in the North Caucasus. In the weeks before the invasion it conducted major exercises with the code name “Kavkaz-2008” (Caucasus 2008). These exercises took place in North Ossetia, just north of the Georgian border. It was a combined forces exercise in which the Russian air force and the Black Sea Fleet also took part. The official reason for the exercise was to improve the army’s preparedness to fight terrorism. However, “such a force was hardly of great utility in fighting terrorists in the mountains, but it was ideal for a conventional invasion of a neighbor. In fact, this exercise was a trial run for the invasion about to take place…. It was de facto a war game to invade Georgia.”[2] When, on August 2, the exercise officially ended, the troops did not return to their barracks, but remained deployed in the frontier region with Georgia. According to Andrey Illarionov, “the build-up culminated with the amassing of 80,000 regular troops and paramilitaries close to the Georgian border, at least 60,000 of which participated in the August war.”[3]

The evacuation of the population of Tskhinvali was already wholly completed before the outbreak of the hostilities. Up to four thousand South Ossetians had crossed the border to neighboring North Ossetia in the Russian Federation. This exodus, meticulously prepared and organized by the authorities, was not a collective summer holiday, as President Kokoity wanted to make out. It was a preventive measure in a war of which the South Ossetian authorities—including the minister of defense, the Russian General Vasily Lunev (who would soon become the commander-in-chief of the attacking Russian 58th Army), already knew that it was going to take place.

Said-Husein Tsarnaev, a journalist with the press agencies RIA Novosti and Reuters, arrived in Tskhinvali on August 4. He was very surprised when he entered the lobby of his hotel in this small provincial town in an isolated and desolate region, far from Moscow, and found the lobby invaded by a crowd of Russian journalists. “We’ve arrived in Tskhinvali three days prior to the attack on the city…,” he wrote later, “we’ve got accommodation in the hotel ‘Alan.’ At once, I’ve noticed about fifty journalists of leading TV channels and newspapers gathered in the hotel. I have experience with two Chechen campaigns and such a crowd of colleagues at the headquarters of peacekeeping forces I took as a disturbing signal.”[4] It was, indeed, a disturbing signal. What were these journalists—many of whom were celebrated Russian star reporters—doing in Tskhinvali, an outpost in the Caucasus, in the first days of August 2008? Who brought them there? What for? And why had the Russian government closed Tskhinvali to non-Russian reporters (except two journalists from Ukraine)? Russian websites have since published lists of the journalists’ names.[5] And, indeed, the fine fleur of the Russian media was present. The journalists represented almost every prominent paper, magazine, and news agency, including Izvestia, Novoe Vremya, Moskovskiy Komsomolets, Nezavisimaya Gazeta, Regnum, ITAR-TASS, and RIA Novosti, not to forget the most important Russian television channels: NTV, REN TV, TVTS, TV Channel “Rossiya,” TV Channel “Mir,” as well as the First and the Fifth TV Channel. Some of the journalists had already arrived on August 2, others on August 5 and 6. Why were they there, in Tskhinvali, a deserted ghost town left by its inhabitants for “holidays” in the Russian Federation? The journalists were obviously waiting for something to happen. They were waiting for what?

On August 6—two days before the start of the hostilities—the pro-Kremlin paper Nezavisimaya Gazeta published an article with the title “Don Cossacks Prepare to Defend the People of South Ossetia against Georgian Aggression.”[6] The Cossacks are fighters who historically played an important role in defending the frontiers of the Russian empire. After having been repressed by the communists, their hosts (locally organized groups) made a glorious comeback in the Russian Federation, and they have fought as mercenaries in many conflicts in the post-Soviet states. In the article in the Nezavisimaya Gazeta the ataman (leader) of the Don Cossacks announced that Cossack fighters were preparing to go to South Ossetia. He said that “Cossacks from the whole of Southern Russia were united in their effort to help the unrecognized republic.”[7] The question is why the Cossack militias were actively preparing to fight in South Ossetia on August 6, yet the war that broke out one day later was represented by the Kremlin as a complete surprise.

The sixth event, however, was the most significant. It was the entry of regular Russian troops into Georgia through the Roki tunnel. Russian troop movements must already have started on August 6, the day before the hostilities began. The Georgian government had intercepted cell-phone conversations between South Ossetian border guards saying that Russian border guards had taken over the control of the Roki tunnel at the Georgian side and that a Russian military column had passed through at about four o’clock in the morning. How many troops had gone through was not clear. The name of a Russian colonel who was in charge was mentioned. He commanded a unit of the 58th Army that was not authorized to be in Georgia. The Georgian peacekeeping commander in South Ossetia, Brigadier General Mamuka Kurashvili, phoned the Russian supreme commander of the mixed (Russian-Georgian) peacekeeping forces, Major General Marat Kulakhmetov, asking for an explanation. Kulakhmetov promised to call back, but did not do so. Thereupon President Saakashvili sent an envoy, Temuri Yakobashvili, to Tskhinvali to talk to a Russian diplomat, Yury Popov. Popov, however, did not show up. The reason he later gave was that his car had a flat tire and he didn’t have a spare one. The only Russian official Yakobashvili was able to meet in a deserted Tskhinvali was General Kulakhmetov. The Russian general proposed that Georgia declare a unilateral ceasefire. During the conversation he told Yakobashvili that he was fed up with the Ossetian separatists, who, according to him, had become uncontrollable, apparently suggesting that the Russians would eventually take a neutral stance if Tbilisi were to attack the separatists.[8]

A SLOW-MOTION ANNEXATION?

The Georgians did not fall in this trap. They followed Kulakhmetov’s advice and declared a unilateral ceasefire on August 7 at 6:40 p.m. The only response was an intensified shelling from 8:30 p.m. of the Georgian villages north of Tskhinvali by South Ossetian militias.[9] At 10:30 p.m. two Georgian peacekeepers were killed and six wounded. Saakashvili received new intelligence reports, transmitted by an American satellite, that a column of 150 Russian tanks had entered the Roki tunnel.[10] Saakashvili found himself confronted by a situation in which Russian troops and heavy equipment were being brought illegally into South Ossetia, gradually building up enough military potential for a direct attack on Georgia. Saakashvili’s efforts to call President Medvedev had no success. On the evening of August 7 Saakashvili was facing a dilemma: allow Russia’s military infiltration of Russia into South Ossetia to continue, and thereby permitting Russia to complete a huge military buildup, and enabling it to crush the Georgian army, or to act.

Ronald D. Asmus has described the extremely stressful and precarious situation in which the Georgian leadership found itself in the late hours of August 7, 2008. “They all believed Georgia was being invaded in a kind of slow-motion, incremental way.”[11] “Moscow,” he wrote, “was trying to de facto annex these two disputed enclaves bit by bit in slow motion—testing to see if the West would protest and daring Tbilisi to try to stop them.”[12] It was also clear that Moscow would have no difficulty in finding an adequate casus belli to invade the territory of Georgia proper in order to reach its ultimate goal: to topple Saakashvili and bring about a regime change in Tbilisi. Waiting for the Russian troops to choose the right moment for attack meant that Georgia would leave the initiative to the other side. Considering the great inequality in manpower and military equipment[13] it would be an easy walkover for the Russians with disastrous consequences for Georgia. Confronted with the continuing incursion by Russian forces into South Ossetia and the intensified shelling of the Georgian villages north of Tskhinvali, at 11:30 p.m. Saakashvili ordered his troops to enter South Ossetia in order to occupy Tskhinvali and stop the advance of the Russian troops. “Did Saakashvili fall into a trap?” asked Svante Cornell and S. Frederick Starr.[14] They concluded: “Maybe so, but… even if he had not, a pretext would have been found to proceed with the campaign as it had been planned.”[15] Indeed, Saakashvili’s decision to attack was a case of a desperate, last minute forward defense, the ultimate trump card Georgia had at its disposal to avoid of being overrun by its huge neighbor. By blocking or preventing a Russian assault, the Georgian leadership—fully aware of the fact that Georgia could never win the war—hoped to win time, thereby enabling the United States and the EU to intervene and find a diplomatic solution.

Some commentators have stressed the fact that the Georgians did not mention the presence of Russian troops in South Ossetia before August 8. This was the case, for instance, with Eric Fournier, the French ambassador in Tbilisi. However, Jonathan Littell brought more clarity in this case when he visited Georgia in October 2008.

It is self-evident that the ambassador of France, one of the leading countries that some months earlier blocked Georgia’s Membership Action Plan for NATO, was not the first one on the list to be called by Saakashvili on that fateful evening.

THE CENTRAL QUESTION: DID RUSSIAN TROOPS ENTER SOUTH OSSETIA BEFORE THE WAR?

The Kremlin has always denied that Russian troops entered South Ossetia before the war. However, despite these denials there are many indications to the contrary that cast doubt on the Kremlin’s official version and vindicate the Georgian version. On August 7, for instance, one day before the war started, the Abkhaz separatist leader Sergey Bagapsh appeared on the Russian TV channel Rossiya, declaring: “I have spoken to the President of South Ossetia. It [the situation] has more or less stabilized now. A battalion from the North Caucasus District has entered the area.”[17] This declaration, confirming the presence of Russian troops in South Ossetia before the war, was not the only one. On August 15, 2008, the regional Russian paper Permskie Novosti published an article with the title “Soldiers from Perm Were in the Epicentre of the War.” In this article is reproduced a telephone call by a soldier of the 58th Army, which had invaded Georgia. The soldier told his parents: “We have been there [in South Ossetia] since August 7. Yeah, our whole 58th Army.”[18] In the article was also mentioned that on August 7 the mobile phones of the soldiers were “muted.”[19] Another indication of the early entry of Russian troops into South Ossetia could be found in an article in Krasnaya Zvezda (The Red Star), the paper of the Russian army, published on September 11, 2008. In this article army Captain Denis Sidristiy, who received the Order for Courage for his personal heroism during the war, gave the following account of the events: “We were on exercise [Kavkaz-2008]. Relatively not far from the capital of South Ossetia…. After the planned exercises we remained in the camp, but on August 7 came the order to go to Tskhinvali.”[20] Sidristiy confirmed that he witnessed during the night of August 7 to 8 the shelling of Tskhinvali by the Georgian army, which would only have been possible after crossing the high Caucasus mountains and when he was already inside South Ossetia. When the article was cited by other media,[21] the interview disappeared suddenly from the website to reappear again with editorial changes that specified the times of the day. The order to march to South Ossetia came now “on 7 August in the night” and captain Sidristiy saw the shelling of Tskhinvali “on 8 August in the morning.”[22] However, these sudden changes to the captain’s memory might have been too blatant: soon afterward the editor of the Krasnaya Zvezda decided to remove the article altogether.[23]

After the opening of the hostilities the Russian propaganda machine immediately swung fully into action, helped by the massive presence in Tskhinvali of the reporters and cameramen from the national TV channels and print media, who had arrived days before the events started. The Russian press agencies began publishing stories of the atrocities supposedly committed by the Georgians against the South Ossetian civil population. A prominent place in these stories was reserved for the accusation that Georgia had committed in South Ossetia a genocide.

RUSSIA ACCUSES GEORGIA OF GENOCIDE

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev himself took the lead, declaring on August 11: “The ferocity with which the actions of the Georgian side were carried out cannot be called anything else but genocide, because they acquired a mass character and were directed against individuals, the civilian population, peacekeepers who carried out their functions of maintaining peace.”[1] The Russian ambassador in Tskhinvali mentioned that “at least 2,000 people were killed in Tskhinvali.”[2] In a fact sheet by the news agency RIA Novosti, issued one month later, this number had shrunk to 1,500 civilians. It was announced that “Russian prosecutors, on orders from President Dmitry Medvedev, are currently gathering evidence to support allegations of genocide committed by Georgia against South Ossetians.”[3] By August 21, this commission had already made a first estimate of 133 civilians killed by the Georgian forces.[4] When, on December 23, 2008, the Investigative Committee of the Prosecutor’s Office of the Russian Federation at last published the final results of its inquiry, instead of 2,000 victims in Tskhinvali alone, the Committee found a total of 162 civilian victims for the whole of South Ossetia.[5] However, the false, Soviet-style accusations directed at the Georgian government were never officially revoked, and until today the accusations of genocide find a prominent place in official and unofficial Russian publications on the war with Georgia.

Apparently, these accusations were prepared in advance by the Russian leadership to construct a semblance of similarity between NATO’s humanitarian intervention in Kosovo and Russia’s intervention in Georgia.[6] The accusations against Georgia were extremely cynical, taking into account the abuses committed by the Russian military in Chechnya, where in two wars at least 10 percent of the population had been killed. Yekaterina Sokiryanskaya of the human rights group Memorial commented: “Talking about the right for independence, about genocide and the war crimes of Mr Saakashvili, Russia’s leaders are perhaps forgetting about the tens of thousands of civilians who were killed by Russia’s bombardment of Grozny and who were executed, cleansed, and tortured by the Russian military in Chechnya.”[7] The Kremlin’s accusations were a clear case of what Robert Amsterdam in a striking comparison has called “the Doppelgänger Theory”: “the Kremlin’s habit of charging their critics with the very activities in which they themselves engage.”[8] It was, by the way, not the first time Georgia was accused of genocide. Already in 1993 Vladimir Zhirinovsky wrote: “Today Georgia is killing Abkhazians, Ossetians, and Europe keeps silent…. There are not many Abkhazians, but they are a people, they want to live on their land and in freedom. But they [the Georgians] are taking this right away. This is a genocide, this is racism and it is happening today. Who is going to stop this?”[9] Especially the accusation of “racism” was particularly unexpected, coming from a politician, who, in the same book, only some pages earlier, compared immigrants from the South with tarakany—cockroaches.

The Kremlin has made a habit of accusing others of crimes of which it has been accused of itself. Yekaterina Sokiryanskaya mentioned already the massive, indiscriminate bombardments of Grozny in the winter of 1999–2000 with thousands of victims amongst the civil population of Chechnya. These bombardments and other atrocities committed in Chechnya made another prominent Russian human rights activist, Sergey Kovalyov, write: “What is new this time around is that Russian society as a whole is prepared to carry out genocide. Cruelty and violence are no longer rejected.”[10]

ETHNIC CLEANSING AND CLUSTER BOMBS

The cynical accusations of genocide, made by the Kremlin, were followed by accusations by Georgia that it was Russia that had practiced ethnic cleansing. The dirty work in this case was mostly done by the South Ossetian militias that had followed the advancing Russian army in armored patrol vehicles with covered licence plates. “Refugees from Karaleki and nearby [Georgian] villages,” wrote Luke Harding of The Guardian, “gave the same account: South Ossetian militias that had swept in on August 12, killing, burning, stealing and kidnapping…. South Ossetian militias, facilitated by the Russian army, are carrying out the worst ethnic cleansing since the war in former Yugoslavia. Despite the random nature of these attacks, the overall aim is clear: to create a mono-ethnic greater South Ossetia in which Georgians no longer exist.”[11] South Ossetians did not attempt to deny that their aim was ethnic cleansing, they even proclaimed it openly. “We did carry out cleaning operations, yes,” admitted Captain Elrus, the militia leader, when asked by Luke Harding. And why shouldn’t he? Had not South Ossetian president, Eduard Kokoity, in an interview in the Russian paper Kommersant, proudly declared: “We have flattened practically everything there [in the Georgian villages].”[12] In a note of the Georgian government one could read that “deliberate attempts by the Russian government to exaggerate the number of people killed in the conflict also provoked revenge attacks on Georgian villagers.”[13] The Russian lies concerning a genocide committed by Georgians had the perverse effect of inciting South Ossetian militias to kill, rape, and loot Georgian citizens with even more fervor.

Human Rights Watch accused Russia of having used cluster bombs against civil targets.[14] Cluster munitions contain dozens and sometimes hundreds of smaller submunitions, or “‘bomblets.” They cause unacceptable suffering because they are spread over a broad area and kill civilians indiscriminately during strikes. Because many bomblets fail to explode, these become landmines that kill and maim people months and even years later. In May 2008, 107 nations agreed to a total ban on cluster munitions. Russia and Georgia were not among the signatories. According to a report by Human Rights Watch, on August 12, 2008, Russian aircraft dropped RBK-250 cluster bombs on the Georgian town of Ruisi, which killed three and wounded five civilians. The same day the Russian army also bombed the market in the center of the town of Gori with cluster bombs. The bombs were launched with an Iskander missile. Eight civilians were killed, and dozens were wounded. Among the dead was Stan Storimans, a Dutch TV cameraman.[15] Novaya Gazeta journalist Yuliya Latynina wrote: “The most precise weapon of Russia, ORTK ‘Iskander,’ already first developed in the 1980s, though only a few examples are today in the possession of the army, struck Georgia twice: on the oil pipeline Baku-Supsa and on the market of Gori on which humanitarian goods were being distributed—the Dutch TV operator Stan Storimans was killed by it…. ‘Iskander’ is a high precision weapon, meaning that either it proved not so precise when it fell on the market, or that the market was targeted, and in that case it was the first time in history that a high precision weapon has been used against the civil population.”[16]

The Dutch government sent a fact-finding commission to Georgia to establish the facts. In its report[17] one could read that the bombardment took place after military and police units of Georgia had already left the town. The bomb clearly targeted the civilian population. At 10:45 a.m. there were twenty explosions in the air, as well as on the ground. Each explosion spread a huge number of small 5mm metal balls. One of these hit and killed Storimans. He was killed by submunitions of a cluster bomb launched with a Russian Iskander SS-26 missile. In a letter to the Dutch Parliament, the Dutch minister of foreign affairs, Maxime Verhagen, wrote that although the use of cluster bombs was not yet forbidden, “parties in a situation of an armed conflict should always make a sharp distinction between military and civilian targets,” and, “taking into account that on August 12 the Georgian military and police had left Gori, the Russian forces should have abstained from using [these weapons]. In light of this I find the conclusion of the investigatory committee very serious and I have explained this to the Russian authorities.”[18] Three days after the attack on Gori, Colonel-General Anatoly Nogovitsyn, deputy chief of Russia’s general staff, categorically denied that such weapons had ever been used in Georgia. “We never use cluster bombs,” he said. “There is no need to do so.”[19] Moreover, the unequivocal findings of the fact-finding commission of the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs did not change the Kremlin’s version of the facts. Commenting on the death of Storimans the spokesman for the Russian Foreign Ministry not only denied the use of cluster bombs, but he went even further and “asserted that there was not enough evidence to conclude that Storimans had been killed as a result of the use of [any] weapons by the Russian side.”[20] In November 2008, some weeks after the publication of the Dutch report, Human Rights Watch wrote: “Russia has continued to deny using cluster munitions in Georgia, but Human Rights Watch finds the evidence to be overwhelming. Human Rights Watch believes that Russia’s use of cluster munitions in populated areas was indiscriminate, and therefore in violation of international humanitarian law.”[21]

DOES A LIE TOLD OFTEN ENOUGH BECOME A TRUTH? THE VICTIM AS AGGRESSOR

There are two opposing conceptions concerning lies. The first is attributed to Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, who is reputed to have said, “A lie told often enough becomes the truth.” There is another one, attributed to US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who said: “Repetition does not transform a lie into a truth.” It is clear that the Russian leadership has a preference for Lenin’s approach. Even faced with unequivocal evidence it continues to deny the facts. Apart from unfounded accusations against Georgia of genocide and the denial of its own use of cluster bombs, the war in Georgia was preceded and accompanied by open lies, misinformation (for instance, about “uncontrollable” South Ossetian militias), and active disinformation,[22] all reminiscent of the old Soviet style. In this way Russia almost succeeded in hiding the most important fact: that this was not a “Russian-Georgian war,” but a Russian war against Georgia in Georgia. There was not a single Georgian soldier that crossed the Russian frontier at any point. The Georgian troops that went into South Ossetia did not cross international frontiers, but intervened in their own country, no different from Russian troops intervening in Chechnya. It was Russian and not Georgian troops that crossed the border of another, sovereign country, in breach of the principles of international law.

The Kremlin’s passport offensive, practiced since 2002, by which Russia “created” its own citizens in a neighboring country, was not only an aggressive and clearly hostile act, it was already in itself a violation of international law and a preparation for the armed attack that would follow some years later. On August 8, 2008, President Medvedev said: “I must protect the life and dignity of Russian citizens wherever they are.”[23] And RIA Novosti wrote that “Russia had repeatedly warned Georgia that it would resort to force to protect its citizens, which most South Ossetian residents are.”[24] Several authors have made comparisons with 1938. In 1994 Zbigniew Brzezinski had already written: “The outspoken president of Kazakhstan, Nursultan Nazarbaev, went as far as to state publicly… that “any talk about the protection of Russians living in Kazakhstan reminds one of the times of Hitler, who also started off with the question of protecting Sudeten Germans.”[25] Comparisons with the German invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1938, might, on first sight, seem exaggerated. Unfortunately, they are not. There are so many similarities that the Czechoslovak case could almost have functioned as a blueprint for the events in Georgia. Germany also started by considering a group of inhabitants of a neighboring country as its own citizens. It financed the political party of the Sudeten Germans, the Sudeten German Party (SdP) led by Konrad Henlein, and supported local militias that committed terrorist acts. “The Sudeten Germans kept 40,000 men, in the shape of free corps, on a war footing.”[26] The Abkhazian army, led by Russian officers, included up to ten thousand soldiers. Additionally there were Abkhazian and South Ossetian private militias of ten thousand to fifteen thousand men. This brought the armed militias inside Georgia to a total of up to twenty-five thousand men.[27] In Czechoslovakia the militias caused trouble and made mischief and asked to be incorporated into the Reich. In the end Germany annexed the Sudetenland. This annexation was only the first step in the further dismemberment of Czechoslovakia. In Georgia a similar scenario took place. Russia trained and armed the militias, let them provoke and attack Georgia, and when there came a Georgian response, Russia came to the rescue of “its own citizens.” Andrey Illarionov, a former Putin aide, called the Russian war against Georgia “one of the most serious international crises for at least the last 30 years.” According to him,

The role of the players in 1938 is well-known. One of the leading dramatis personae in this period was Neville Chamberlain. “On 27 September 1938 he openly confessed to his horror at the idea of going to war ‘because of a quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing.’”[29] Europeans had to pay a heavy toll for their disregard of the interests of a new, small, and faraway country. At that time they did not realize that not only the interests of this small country were at stake, but also the foundations of the existing international order of their time. For many Europeans the war in 2008 in Georgia was equally “a quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing.” After the war Russia was only symbolically sanctioned. Even the most obvious measures were not taken. “But why has Russia not been suspended from the Council of Europe, an organisation based on respect for human rights?” asked the Financial Times.[30] Indeed, why not? As in 1938, Europeans could—later—regret their lukewarm response.[31]

As could be expected, after the war Russia got the support of Kremlin-friendly Western experts. One of them was Hélène Carrère d’Encausse, doyenne of the French Kremlin watchers (although more a specialist on tsarist history than on modern Russian politics). Over the years Carrère d’Encausse has developed a warm personal relationship with the Russian leadership. As a regular participant in the seminars of the Valdai Club—sometimes referred to as Putin’s fan club—she received on November 4, 2009, from the hands of President Medvedev the Russian Order of Honor. She was also a prominent guest at the State Dinner, organized on March 2, 2010, on the occasion of Medvedev’s official visit to France. In her book La Russie entre deux mondes (Russia between Two Worlds), she wrote that the rebellion of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, when it started, certainly was “illegitimate and should have been ended.” However, she continued, “the military defeat calls this pretention into question and modifies slightly the geography of the lost territories, still reducing that [part] which is controlled by Tbilisi.”[32] Why the military defeat of Georgia against an aggressor would call into question Georgia’s right to have its national integrity restored is not indicated. Further in the text she refers to “the two separatist States.” The word “States” is written with a capital S in the text.[33] According to their status in international law the correct title would have been: the two separatist “entities” or “provinces.” Apparently the author had no principal objections to the “independence” of the two provinces, but, on the contrary, fully condoned the Russian land grab.[34]

THE REAL REASONS FOR MOSCOW’S LAND GRAB

On November 21, 2011, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev visited the headquarters of the 58th Army in Vladikavkaz. This was the army that led the invasion of Georgia in August 2008. He gave a speech in which the official Kremlin version of the war—that it was “a humanitarian intervention to prevent genocide in South Ossetia”—was put into a broader context. While emphasizing that the intervention was a necessary “peace-enforcement operation,” he mentioned a second and quite different objective: “to curb the threat which was coming at the time from the territory of Georgia.” “If we had faltered in 2008,” Medvedev said, “[the] geopolitical arrangement would be different now and a number of countries in respect of which attempts were made to artificially drag them into the North Atlantic Alliance, would have probably been there [in NATO] now.”[35] It took the Kremlin three years to unveil the real reason for its intervention: to stop Georgia’s eventual NATO membership. Stopping NATO membership necessitated, however, for the Kremlin a second objective: a regime change in Tbilisi. In her memoirs the former US secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, revealed how the Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, called her in August 2008 and shamelessly proposed a regime change in Tbilisi as a condition for a Russian troop withdrawal. “The other demand,” said Lavrov to Rice, “is just between us. Misha Saakashvili has to go.”[36] “I couldn’t believe my ears,” wrote Rice, “and I reacted out of instinct, not analysis.”[37] Condoleezza Rice refused to negotiate the removal of a democratically elected president. When Lavrov repeated that it was “just between us” and asked her not to talk to others about his demand, this was similarly rejected by her. It was clear that the objective of regime change was not something that just popped up during the negotiations. It had been prepared months, and probably years, before. It was, apparently, apart from the dismemberment of Georgia, the real reason for the Russian invasion.

In his memoirs Tony Blair wrote about a visit to Russia at the end of April 2003. “Vladimir Putin launched into a vitriolic attack at the press conference,” wrote Blair, “really using the British as surrogates for the U.S., and then afterwards at dinner we had a tense, and at times heated, discussion [on the Iraq war]. He was convinced the U.S. was set on a unilateralist course, not for a good practical purpose but as a matter of principle. Time and again, he would say, ‘Suppose we act against Georgia, which is a base for terrorism against Russia—what would you say if we took Georgia out?’”[38] It is telling that Putin at that time gave exactly this example. The project was, apparently, already in 2003 on the mind of the Kremlin’s master. There are other facts that support this interpretation. On August 7, 2013, on the evening of the fifth anniversary of the war, Georgian President Mikheil Saakasvili, in a prerecorded interview on Georgia’s Rustavi-2 TV, told that he had met Putin in Moscow in February 2008 at an informal summit of the CIS. During the summit he told Putin that he was ready to say no to NATO in exchange for Russian help with the reintegration of the two breakaway territories. Saakashvili claimed “that ‘Putin did not even think for a minute” about his proposal. “[Putin] smiled and said, ‘We do not exchange your territories for your geopolitical orientation…. And it meant ‘we will chop off your territories anyway.’”[39] Saakashvili asked him to talk about the growing tensions along the borders with South Ossetia, saying, “It could not be worse than now.” “That’s when he [Putin] looked at me and said: ‘And here you are very wrong. You will see that very soon it will be much, much, much worse.’”[40]

This information came in the summer of 2012, a year after, quite unexpectedly, we were allowed already a glimpse inside the Kremlin’s kitchen. On August 5, 2012, a few days before the fourth anniversary of the war, a forty-seven-minute Russian documentary film “8 Avgusta 2008. Poteryannyy den” (8 August 2008. The Lost Day) was posted on YouTube.[41] In the film retired and active service generals accused former President Medvedev of indecisiveness and even cowardice during the conflict. They praised Putin, on the other hand, for his bold and vigorous action. According to one of Medvedev’s critics, retired Army General Yury Baluevsky, a former First Deputy Defense Minister and Chief of the General Staff, “a decision to invade Georgia was made by Putin before Medvedev was inaugurated President and Commander-in-Chief in May 2008. A detailed plan of military action was arranged and unit commanders were given specific orders in advance.”[42] It is clear that these new facts support the interpretation, defended in this book, that, far from being a spontaneous Russian reaction to rescue its peacekeepers and “prevent a genocide,” the Russian invasion of August 2008 was a carefully planned operation. After the release of the documentary film Putin confirmed that the Army General Staff had, indeed, prepared a plan of military action against Georgia. It was prepared “at the end of 2006, and I authorized it in 2007,” he said.[43] Interestingly, Putin also said “that the decision to ‘use the armed forces’ had been considered for three days—from around 5 August,”[44] which clearly contradicts the official Russian version that the Russian army only reacted to a Georgian attack that started on August 7. According to this plan not only heavy weaponry and troops were prepared for the invasion, but also South Ossetian paramilitary units were trained to support the Russian invading troops. Pavel Felgenhauer commented:

After World War II the American diplomat and Russia expert George Kennan wrote: “It would be useful to the Western world to realize that despite all the vicissitudes by which Russia has been afflicted since August 1939, the men in the Kremlin have never abandoned their faith in that program of territorial and political expansion which had once commended itself so strongly to Tsarist diplomatists.”[1] These words were true after World War II, but are they still true today? Could one say, paraphrasing Kennan’s dictum, “that despite all the vicissitudes by which Russia has been afflicted since August 1991—the KGB inspired coup and the subsequent demise of the Soviet Union—the men in the Kremlin have never abandoned their faith in that program of territorial and political expansion which had once commended itself so strongly to Soviet diplomatists”? This was the central question of this book. Could a great power for which a quasi-permanent, continued, and centuries-long territorial and political expansion has been the natural way of life, suddenly become a “normal,” post-imperial state? If one listens to some analysts, post-Soviet Russia simply had no choice but to adapt to its status of post-imperial country. Alexander Motyl, for instance, wrote:

Motyl wrote these words in 2006, two years before the Russian invasion of Georgia and the dismemberment of this small neighboring country. Another author, who explicitly considered the demise of the Russian empire as definitive, was Manuel Castells. According to Castells,

Castells wrote these words in 1997, a year in which Russia seemed to have accepted definitively the loss of empire. Moreover, Castells was certainly right that there would be no reconstruction of the Soviet Union, which had disappeared, forever, with its ideological glue: communism. But empires do not need to be communist, as history teaches us. And empires need not be built only in a nineteenth-century way: relying almost exclusively on military power. They can also be built—or rebuilt—in a postmodern way, making use of a smart mix, which not only includes blackmail, pressure, and naked military power, but also financial instruments, economic leverage, and soft power.

We already cited in the introduction Dmitry Trenin, who, in the same vein as the two aforementioned authors, wrote: “The Russian empire is over, never to return. The enterprise that had lasted for hundreds of years simply lost the drive. The élan has gone.”[4] Unlike the other authors, who gave their optimistic assessments before the Russian invasion of Georgia, Trenin’s book was published after the invasion of Georgia and after the gas wars with Ukraine in 2006 and 2009. Trenin, who gave his book the title Post-Imperium, added the subtitle A Eurasian Story. He probably did so without any prior knowledge of Putin’s latest geopolitical project: his book was published before Putin wrote his famous Izvestia article in which he announced the formation of a Eurasian Union[5] and also before the summit on December 19, 2011, during which the presidents of Russia, Belarus, and Kazakhstan, officially launched the project of the Eurasian Union. Paradoxically—and ironically—Trenin added Putin’s latest, and most important imperial project as a subtitle to a book in which he argued that Russia had definitively lost its imperial drive.

THE CRUCIAL YEAR 1997

Looking back however, it was not the year 2011—the year in which Putin launched his project of the Eurasian Union—which was crucial to Russia’s new course, nor was it the year 1999, when Putin became acting president. In retrospect, the crucial year was 1997. In this year Russia stood at a crossroads. On May 27, 1997, after long hesitation, President Yeltsin signed the “Founding Act on Mutual Relations, Cooperation and Security between NATO and the Russian Federation.” In this act the Russian Federation committed itself to a set of common principles. Among these principles was featured the “respect for sovereignty, independence, and territorial integrity of all states and their inherent right to choose the means to ensure their own security.”[6] The Kremlin’s recognition of the inherent right of all states “to choose the means to ensure their own security” was a major step forward on the road to a post-imperial state. It was the recognition of the sovereign right of both the post-Soviet states and the former Soviet bloc countries of Eastern Europe to choose their own alliances, including the right to become a member of NATO. In the same year—in July 1997—at the Madrid NATO summit, Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic were invited to join the Alliance.

Reactions in the West were more than positive. In an article with the title “From Empire to Nation State,” Chrystia Freeland wrote in the Financial Times: “After devoting five centuries to imperial expansion, Russia seems abruptly to have reconciled itself to a diminished global role.”[7] She quoted Andrei Piontkovsky, director of the Moscow-based Center for Strategic Studies, who said: “This spring was a turning point in Russia’s choice between being an imperial power and a nation state. It marked a strong decision to reject empire.”[8] And he added: “The really surprising thing is that the negative reaction to the loss has not been stronger.”[9] However, the Russian advance toward a democratic, post-imperial state during Boris Yeltsin’s second presidential term was not as straightforward as these enthusiastic comments seemed to suggest. Russia’s progress resembled rather the dancing procession of Echternach, in which three steps forward are preceded and followed by two steps backward. This is because, in the same year—on April 2, 1997—Yeltsin signed with the Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko a Union Treaty leading to a Union State of Russia and Belarus. The signing of the treaty, wrote the Financial Times, “drew rare praise for Mr. Yeltsin from his Communist and nationalist opponents.”[10] This praise was no surprise, because the initiative put Russia on a quite different track: that of a neoimperial state. The French paper Le Monde referred to a debate in the Russian government between “occidentalists,” wanting to join the European democratic mainstream, and “Slavophiles,” wanting to build a Slavic Union under the aegis of Russia. The first group included two deputy prime ministers: Boris Nemtsov and Anatoly Chubais, and the leader of the liberal Yabloko fraction, Grigory Yavlinsky.[11] The second group included not only ultranationalists, such as Vladimir Zhirinovsky and the communist Gennady Zyuganov, but also Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin and Foreign Minister Yevgeny Primakov.[12] Primakov, who would shortly afterward become prime minister, was the former head of the SVR, the external intelligence service, a follow-up organization to the First Chief Directorate of the KGB. Primakov was described by Ronald Asmus as someone, who “had made his career by standing up to the West—‘the man who could say Nyet.’”[13] He “saw his job as masking Russian weakness while rebuilding Moscow’s strength. By his desk, he kept a small bust of Prince Alexandr Gorchakov, a 19th-century Russian Foreign Minister under Czar Alexander II who had presided over Russia’s recovery from its total defeat in the Crimean war. Partnership with the U.S. was not part of his lexicon.”[14]

In an editorial Le Monde wrote at that time that the treaty on the Union State between Yeltsin and Lukashenko “emphasizes in the first place the permanent desire of the Kremlin to gather around it the former Soviet republics, at least the Slavic ones. Everything suggests that Ukraine will be next to bear the brunt of the Russian pressure: already dependent of her ‘big brother’ for her energy, she finds herself surrounded on three sides by Russian garrisons.”[15] This commentary was, indeed, farsighted. The objective to bring Ukraine back in its orbit would become the overriding motive behind the Kremlin’s policies in the next decade. The choice facing Russia in 1997 was the choice between becoming a “normal,” democratic nation state, living in peace with its neighbors, or becoming—again—an empire. In the crucial year, 1997, the Founding Act with NATO pointed in the direction of the former, the Union Treaty with Belarus toward the latter. It was as though both initiatives mimicked the Russian coat of arms: the double-headed eagle whose heads face in two opposite directions. It was clear from the beginning that these two strategies could not be reconciled. As soon as 1994 Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote: “In not being an empire, Russia stands a chance of becoming, like France or Britain or earlier post-Ottoman Turkey, a normal state.”[16] He added the warning: “If not openly imperial, the current objectives of Russian policy are at the very least proto-imperial. That policy may not yet be aiming explicitly at a formal imperial restoration, but it does little to restrain the strong imperial impulse that continues to motivate large segments of the state bureaucracy, especially the military, as well as the public.”[17] Brzezinski’s caution was certainly justified. It was shared by the Russian liberal politician Yegor Gaidar, who was Yeltsin’s prime minister from June 15, 1992, to December 14, 1992. Referring to the years 1918–1922—when the Red Army, in only four years, reconquered most of the lost tsarist territories—he wrote: “Russia is unique in restoring a failed empire.”[18]

Putin’s project for a Eurasian Union is the Kremlin’s latest attempt to reintegrate the post-Soviet space. According to Jeremy Smith, a professor of Russian history at the University of Eastern Finland, “It is less clear what economic advantages Russia gains from the Union, given that so much of its trade is orientated to Europe, China, and elsewhere.”[19] According to Smith, “this has fuelled the suspicion that the whole project is a way of enhancing Russian regional hegemony and, in the most alarmist interpretations, moving toward the recreation of some form of the USSR…. Critics of the project maintain that, like the European Union, pressures for political integration will follow close upon the heels of economic integration, with the major difference that there will be a clear hegemonic power, Russia, dominating the Union.”[20] One must add here one important reservation: the project of the Eurasian Union was not launched to recreate the Soviet Union, and the objective is not to reintegrate the Central Asian states into Russia proper. Its real and overriding objective is preventing Ukraine from establishing closer relations with the European Union and NATO, bringing this country definitively and irreversibly back into the orbit of its Slavic “brother country” Russia. This objective is openly admitted. Fyodor Lukyanov, for instance, a prominent Russian political scientist, wrote in a comment on Putin’s Eurasia article: “The paradox of the Eurasian Union is that its primary goal is not Eurasia. Its most desired object is Ukraine.”[21] Lukyanov considered membership of Ukraine—a country of 45 million—an economic necessity to make the Eurasian Union work. He also mentioned that “the growth of xenophobia [in Russia]… means that building an integrationist unification with the Central Asian countries will be accompanied by increased tensions. Ukraine is, in this sense, the ideal partner, together with Belarus, in as much as it immediately brings a sense of ‘Slavicness’ to the created structure.”[22] Lukyanov spoke further, tellingly, of an “attempt to bring together what is profitable [the Slavic countries] and dissociate oneself from ‘ballast’ [i.e., the Central Asian countries].”[23]

THE KREMLIN’S OBSESSION WITH UKRAINE

During the Russia-NATO Council session in Bucharest in April 2008, Putin called Ukraine “a complex state formation. If the NATO issue is added there,” he said, “along with other problems, this may bring Ukraine to the verge of existence as a sovereign state.”[24] Later during the same summit, in a discussion with U.S. President George Bush, Putin said that Ukraine was “not a real country.” This is clearly light-years away from the “common principles” laid down in the Founding Act, signed by Russia and the members of NATO in 1997, in which Russia had recognized the inherent right of all countries “to choose the means to ensure their own security.” Putin’s declaration was a scarcely veiled threat that Russia would intervene if Ukraine decided to join NATO. Doubts on Ukraine’s viability as a sovereign state were expressed on many occasions by leading Russians. On March 16, 2009, the Kremlin ideologue Gleb Pavlovsky wrote in the Russkiy Zhurnal, a Russian online magazine of which he is the owner, an article titled: “Will Ukraine Lose Its Sovereignty?”[25] This article was followed four days later by an interview with Sergey Karaganov, the éminence grise of the Russian foreign policy community and head of the Presidium of the Council on Foreign and Defense Policy. This article had the title: “No One Needs Monsters. Desovereignization of Ukraine.”[26] Karaganov depicted Ukraine as a failed state that was in a process of “passive desovereignization.” The process was, however, not only “passive.” Karaganov warned that “Russia will not want to see absolutely ungovernable territories close by.”[27] Yuriy Shcherbak, former Ukrainian ambassador to the United States, wrote in response: “In military language it is called the ideological-propagandistic support of the future operation on capturing the territory of a sovereign state.”[28] In fact, Russian politicians continued to denounce Ukraine as an “artificial” country that had no right to exist. At the height of the financial crisis Valery Fadeyev, editor of the political journal Ekspert, wrote: “Ukraine is cheap, we can buy it.”[29] It sounded less aggressive, almost as a joke, but it expressed the same contempt for Russia’s neighbor and its status as an independent, sovereign state.

In the Russian war of nerves with Ukraine Kirill, the patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church, also played an important role. From July 27 to August 5, 2009, Kirill visited Ukraine. His tour brought him not only to the pro-Russian eastern part, but equally to the western part of the country. One of his objectives was to suppress the pro-independence mood of the local church.[30] Kirill talked a lot about the “common heritage” and the “common destination” of Ukraine and Russia. However, his intervention went further than simply delivering a spiritual message. According to Pavel Korduban, “One of his [Kirill’s] chief ideologists, Andrey Kuraev, was more outspoken, threatening Ukraine with a civil war should a single church fully independent from Moscow ever be established.”[31] Olexandr Paliy, a historian at the Diplomatic Academy of the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry, commented: “We’ve seen more of a Russian state official than a religious figure…. The Church is being used as an instrument in the Kremlin’s game.”[32] Oleh Medvedev, adviser of Yulia Tymoshenko, then Ukrainian prime minister, was more outspoken. He described Kirill’s tour “as a visit of an imperialist who preached the neo-imperialist Russian World doctrine.”[33] When the archives of the KGB were opened after the demise of the Soviet Union, also a file on Kirill was found, indicating that he had worked for the KGB under the code name “Mikhailov.”[34] It is, therefore, no surprise that the patriarch is working hand in hand with the Kremlin. Under Putin the Russian Orthodox Church has acquired the status of a semiofficial state church and the relations between the hierarchy and the political leadership have become even closer than in tsarist times. How close the relationship between the Moscow patriarchate and the Kremlin has become was particularly evident when, immediately after his visit to Ukraine, Kirill went to the Kremlin to report to President Medvedev.

Kirill’s visit in the summer of 2009 was clearly part of a broader psychological and political offensive. Some weeks after Kirill’s visit President Medvedev published a video blog and an open letter to Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko on the Russian presidential website. On this video Medvedev was overlooking the Black Sea where one could see two frigates menacingly on the horizon. Medvedev was dressed in black. The Economist even spoke of an “ominous black.”[35] Being dressed intimidatingly in threatening black had become a part of the symbolism used by the Kremlin when it addressed—directly or indirectly—the Ukrainian leadership, as if to emphasize that between the two countries normal, civilized, diplomatic relations no longer existed. Some observers, such as Brzezinski, made comparisons with the black clothing of Mussolini.[36] Others made comparisons with the oprichniki, the secret police of Ivan the Terrible, who were also dressed in black. Medvedev’s open letter was a reaction to the expulsion by Ukraine of two Russian diplomats, accused of undermining activities. “We are more than just neighbors,” wrote Medvedev in his open letter, “our ties are those of brothers.”[37] He went on, citing Gogol, that “there are no bonds more sacred than the bonds of brotherhood.” After this declaration of brotherly love there followed a list of complaints concerning Ukraine’s support for Georgian President Saakashvili and the “overt distortion of complex and difficult episodes in our common history, the tragic events of the great famine in the Soviet Union, and an interpretation of the Great Patriotic War as some kind of confrontation between two totalitarian systems.”[38] Medvedev’s letter explicitly referred to Patriarch Kirill’s visit to Ukraine, which was considered “an event of great significance.” “I had a meeting with the Patriarch following the visit,” wrote Medvedev, “and he shared my impressions and said many cordial words. We both are of the same opinion that the two fraternal peoples may not be separated as they share [a] common historical and spiritual heritage.” Such a message from the Kremlin master that the two “fraternal peoples” may not be separated was not reassuring for worried Ukrainians, who shortly before had read articles in the Russian media, announcing Ukraine’s imminent “desovereignization.” Special attention should also be paid here to the language of Medvedev’s message. The use of fraternal and paternal metaphors has a long tradition in Russia. “We have a good idea of what Stalin has in mind,” wrote Richard Sennett, “when he declares ‘I am your father.’ He is going to force other people to do his bidding; he asserts his right to do so because he is the collective father. After a while people will habitually obey; the habit of obedience is discipline.”[39] Using the “brother” metaphor Medvedev spoke as the older brother to the smaller, younger brother, implicitly claiming authority over the other. As Sennett rightly observed: “Metaphors are put to oppressive uses.”[40]

Medvedev concluded his open letter with the words that “there can be no doubt that the multifaceted ties between Russia and Ukraine will resume on a fundamentally different level—that of strategic partnership—and this moment will not be long in coming.”[41] These words could be perceived by the Ukrainians as an unveiled threat, because the “strategic partnership” the Kremlin wanted to establish with Ukraine would certainly include a restriction of Ukraine’s freedom of choice over its security arrangements, a freedom that nevertheless figured prominently in the Founding Act of 1997. Since the election of the more Russia-friendly President Viktor Yanukovych in 2010 the Russian pressure on Ukraine has not subsided. On the contrary: Russian pressure on Ukraine to join the Customs Union and Eurasian Union has only increased. The Kremlin uses both carrot and stick. The carrot is represented by a Russian offer to sell its gas to Ukraine for $160 per cubic meter instead of $425—a discount of more than 62 percent![42] The stick consists of a potential restriction of the number of Ukrainian migrant workers in Russia, estimated at between two and three million per year.[43] The Russian authorities have already announced that from January 2015 citizens from the CIS countries need foreign passports to travel to Russia.[44] The Russian pressure, however, also takes the form of outright blackmail. An example of the latter is the so called “Yamal-Europe Two” project—a proposal, made on April 3, 2013, by Putin and Gazprom’s CEO Aleksey Miller to Poland, to build a new gas pipeline over Polish territory to Slovakia. This project, aimed “to demonstrate that Moscow can shift gas export volumes into new bypass pipelines, away from Ukraine’s gas transit system to Europe, eventually nullifying the system’s value.”[45] This proposal was experienced by the Ukrainians as a direct attack. Some weeks later, on April 25, 2013, Putin, in a televised phone-in session in Moscow, went so far as to issue a warning that if Ukraine did not join the Eurasian Union it faced the potential “de-industrialisation” of multiple sectors within its economy.”[46]

In the meantime negotiations between Ukraine and the European Union on an Association Agreement have reached a decisive phase. On March 30, 2012—after five years of intensive negotiations—the chief negotiators of the EU and Ukraine initialed the text of the Association Agreement, which included setting up a Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Area (DCFTA). The text was hailed by some as “the most extensive international legal document in the entire history of Ukraine and the most extensive international agreement with a third country ever concluded by the European Union.”[47] Unfortunately, however, due to election fraud and selective justice (the imprisonment of former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko), the EU decided to delay the signing of the agreement. Although association with the EU would be in the long-term interest of Ukraine, eventually raising the prospect of EU membership, it is not certain that the Ukrainian government would make the necessary efforts to take up this opportunity. Russia, which does not formulate conditions of democratic governance or human rights, makes things much easier for Yanukovych. Moreover, the benefits (lower energy prices) are immediate. It is still an open question whether Ukraine will be able to resist the Russian pressure. On May 22, 2013, the Ukrainian government signed a memorandum applying for observer status in the Russia-dominated Customs Union.[48] Ukraine considers association with the EU compatible with a similar relationship with the Customs Union/Eurasian Union. However, this is not the case for Moscow. The Kremlin put enormous pressure on Viktor Yanukovych to shelve an Association Agreement with the EU, which the Ukrainian president planned to sign in Vilnius on November 28, 2013. The Kremlin’s blackmail was successful. Yanukovych refused to sign the agreement—the result of six years of hard, protracted negotiations—in exchange for the Kremlin’s offer of a $15 billion loan and a discount in the price of Russian gas. Yanukovych met with mass protests at home. The protesters were not reassured by his statement that a Ukrainian membership of the Eurasian Union was not (yet) on the agenda. It is clear, however, that most European governments, treating the relationship with Ukraine as a technocratic problem, have massively underestimated the important geopolitical implications of Ukraine’s choice. However, it is not sure that this is also the case for Moscow. If Ukraine were to opt for deeper integration into the European Union, a Georgian scenario could not be excluded, in which the Kremlin could provoke riots in Eastern Ukraine or the Crimea, where many Russian passport holders live. This would offer Russia a pretext for intervening in Ukraine in order “to protect its nationals” and dismember the country. Unfortunately, such a scenario cannot be excluded. It is a corollary of the five principles of Russian foreign policy, formulated by President Medvedev on August 31, 2008. The fourth principle he mentioned was “protecting the lives and dignity of our citizens, wherever they may be.”[49] It leaves the door open for military adventures throughout Russia’s “neighborhood.”

In 1992 Brzezinski warned: “The crucial issue here… is the future stability and independence of Ukraine.”[50] In 2012—twenty years later—in his book Strategic Vision, Brzezinski repeated this warning, writing: “It cannot be stressed enough that without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be an empire, but with Ukraine suborned and then subordinated, Russia automatically becomes an empire.”[51] Brzezinski’s warning is, more than ever, still relevant today. It is not without reason that Polish analysts especially, or analysts of Polish origin, warn about the dangers of Russia’s new imperialism.[52] Their country was, in the twentieth century (and in the centuries before), the main victim in Europe of the aggression from the imperialist powers, which dismembered and occupied the country. When the Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski was asked: “Can you imagine any kind of renewed geopolitical conflict to your west in your lifetime?” he answered “I have a vivid imagination, but no, I cannot imagine an armed conflict between us and Germany.”[53] When asked: “Does your imagination extend to the possibility of a future conflict to the east?” he answered: “Our relations with Russia, like yours [U.S.A.], are pragmatic but brittle. And unfortunately, after the war between Russia and Georgia, I’m afraid conflict in Europe is imaginable.”[54] Another East European politician, Czech President Vaclav Havel, expressed the same concern sixteen years earlier: “I have said it so often: if the West does not stabilize the East, the East will destabilize the West.”[55] This is a warning that should be taken seriously.