With so much going on with Brexit, the Middle East and terror attacks around the globe — not to mention the ongoing verbal slugfest between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton — the plight of the former Soviet republic of Georgia and its struggle to reclaim a fifth of its territory lost to Russia in 2008 as a result of a war of aggression has faded from the minds of most international pundits.
The war itself, which ostensively was over the control of the Georgian provinces of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, was an exercise in military overkill, with Moscow launching a full-scale land and air offensive and sending thousands of reinforcements through the strategic Roki Tunnel, dwarfing and quickly overpowering Georgia’s tiny 38,000-soldier army and taking control of the regions.
Russian troops then expanded their push further into Georgian territory, opening a second corridor along Abkhazia, seizing the country’s main port on the Black Sea and advancing to just outside Tbilisi.
The brutal five-day war displaced 300,000 people in Georgia, and while some of them were able to return to their homes after the conflict, more than 230,000 Georgians are still geographic refugees within their own country, supported by the Tbilisi government.
Under the tutelage of Russia, the disputed provinces of South Ossetia and Abkhazia eventually declared themselves independent republics, but in reality, they both became puppet governments, wholly dependent on Moscow for their economic survival in exchange for serving as military bases for thousands of Russian troops.
Today, eight years after the Russian invasion of Georgia, some 10,000 Russian troops still occupy these two Georgian provinces, and Moscow has slowly been extending its land grab into more Georgian territory.
Since the ceasefire, Russia has ignored and continually violated a Six Point Ceasefire Agreement brokered after the war by then-French President Nicolas Sarkozy and has carried out a creeping annexation on Georgian soil, erecting barbed-wire fences and positioning new border signs along its snatched territories.
There is a Line of Occupation near the Georgian village of Odzisi which separates free and democratic Georgia from Russian-occupied and oppressed Georgia.
In a scenario reminiscent of Korea’s North-South Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), a sandbag bunker flying the Georgian flag manned with Georgian police stands only a few hundred meters from a comparable Russian dugout.
The white, blue and red tricolor that waves above the Russian military base at the Moscow-imposed border inside Georgia is in blatant violation of international law.
To this day, Russia steadfastly refuses to allow foreign observers into South Ossetia and Abkhazia, while Georgia provides these observers unfettered access.
It is worth noting that before the 2008 war, Russia recognized both regions to be part of Georgia’s territorial integrity. (And most of the international community still does, with the exception of a few leftist governments that are in bed with or have been paid off by Moscow.)
Although the Kremlin has tried to smooth over the occupation as South Ossetia and Abkhazia as a defense of two breakaway provinces, Tbilisi insists that Russian President Vladimir Putin use the occupation of its territories as a first step in his plan to create a new post-Cold War Eurasian Union.
Indeed, Moscow launched the invasion shortly after Tbilisi began flirting with Western Europe after is 2003 Rose Revolution, a romance that Putin was not quite ready to tolerate in his backyard.
The occupation of parts of Georgia was a deliberate precursor to Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine, a testing of the waters to see how the West would react to Putin’s stealth expansionism into its former republics and beyond.
Now that Russia has proven its military prowess and political statesmanship in Syria, Putin is back to his old tricks in Georgia, moving his army even further south of South Ossetia and annexing territory along the way.
While Putin’s perceived manifest destiny to create an expanded Russian superpower may be one of the reasons for his refusal to relinquish the occupied regions of Georgia, it is not the only one.
Moscow has never been fond of pipelines bypassing Russian territory and has long wanted to have a hand in the flow of oil and gas from the Caspian region to Europe.
Putin’s most recent border lurch has positioned his army to directly threaten important transport links between Georgia and the outside world, placing the new administrative boundary fence within 500 meters of Georgia’s main highway linking the Black Sea to Azerbaijan and usurping a 1.6-kilometer segment of the BP-operated Baku-Supsa pipeline.
Clearly, there are lessons to be learned from Russia’s invasion and annexation of parts of Georgia.
Now it is up to the West to heed those lessons before Putin annexes even more territory in Europe and Asia.
Thérèse Margolis can be reached at therese.margolis@gmail.com.