1. Russian Strategic Goals
While Russia treats its true strategic intentions as state secrets, the concept of sustaining or increasing relative regional military power paints a fairly clear picture of Russia’s desired strategic end-state with regard to Georgia. “Russia’s invasion of Georgia was not merely a response to that small country’s seeming to thumb its nose at the Kremlin, but an important building block in Putin’s much larger geopolitical edifice.”235 Russia’s ability to project power southwards through the Caucasus in the
direction of Turkey and Iran is degraded by the extremely rugged Greater Caucasus Mountain Range that largely defines the Russian-Georgian border. “The main goal of the military operation in Georgia and the Black Sea was…to take irreversible control of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. The establishment of sizable Russian military bases in
233 Gordadze, Georgian-Russian Relations in the 1990s, 41. 234 Ibid., 43.
Abkhazia and South Ossetia as well as control over critical mountain crossings [would] significantly improved Russia’s strategic military position in the Caucasus region.”236 A
permanent Russian military presence in Abkhazia and South Ossetia provides Russia with a military capability that is free of the geographical choke points of the natural terrain.
Russia’s strategic view regarding Georgia is primarily based on geography. Georgia lies on the transit corridor between the Central Asia and Europe and is situated on the land bridge between the Black and Caspian Seas. Georgia also shares a border with NATO member Turkey. Abkhazia makes up about half of Georgia’s Black Sea Coast, a body of water over which Russia has always attempted to maintain a dominant position. Russia’s strategic goals in Georgia can be categorized as those that further Russia’s dominance over the former Soviet space and those that preempt external actors from attempting to challenge that dominion. Locally, Russia’s aims include the age-old practice of controlling geographic territory and taking steps to protect the Russian monopoly on the transit of oil and gas between Central Asia and Europe. Russia wants to prevent a former Soviet state in the Caucasus from joining NATO, not just because of that state’s location, but also because Russia wants to other states from entertaining a similar notion. “The main task of the Russian invasion was to bring about state failure and fully destroy the Georgian army and centralized police force. A failed Georgian state, torn apart by political rivalry and regional warlords, cannot ever become a NATO member and could be easier to control from Moscow.”237
While the existential threat that NATO expansion might present to Russian sovereignty is either perceived as very real or at least as a very useful pretext by the Putin regime, the moves toward increasing authoritarianism and the crushing of Russian opposition movements demonstrate the Kremlin’s very strong concern about the threat of Russian populist movements finding inspiration in a place where Putin had asserted they
236 Carolina V. Pallin and Fredrik Westerlund, “Russia’s War in Georgia: Lessons and Consequences,” Small Wars & Insurgencies 20:2 (2009): 403.
237 Pavel Felgenhauer, “After August 7: The Escalation of the Russia-Georgia War,” in The Guns of
August 2008: Russia’s War in Georgia, eds. Svante E. Cornell and S. Frederick Starr (Armonk, NY: M.E.
were doomed to fail due to their alien “Western” nature.238 Putin’s regime has long
viewed the so called “color revolutions,” particularly the 2003 Rose Revolution in Georgia and the 2004 Orange Revolution in Ukraine, as western plots to install western leaning regimes in the former Soviet space. Should these movements produce effective democratic governments, they might inspire similar movements in Moscow.239 Moscow
therefore seeks to weaken the democratic institutions in Georgia so they don’t spread north and threaten Putin’s regime. A senior Russian official eventually disclosed the Russian strategic goals of the Georgian war as: “1) Establishing full Russian control over South Ossetia, 2) Assisting Abkhazia in gaining control over several Georgian villages to create a more desirable border, while expelling Georgian forces from the Kodori Gorge, 3) Permanently stationing Russian troops [in Georgia] on the buffer zone between Abkhazia and Georgia proper, 4) Humiliating the Georgian leadership, and 5) Preventing Georgia from ever becoming a NATO member.”240
In the years leading up to the 2008 invasion it was imperative for Russia to control the regular flare-ups of violence in order to preserve the Russian initiative for a military resolution. If there were to be an all-out effort by Georgia to crush the rebels when Russia was not expecting it, it might take months to activate and position the forces necessary for a response, a task whose difficulty would be compounded if Georgian forces were to control the Roki Tunnel and the Abkhaz rail chokepoints. Russia eventually appointed Russian officers to the leadership of both militias, a move that made all ensuing significant militia action a product of Russian direction. “It is undeniable that both parties—the Russian-Abkhazian-South Ossetian coalition, on the one hand, and Georgia on the other—took steps toward a military solution of the crisis, or, more correctly the crises. Nevertheless, it appears obvious that the initiative in most, if not all,
238 Svante E. Cornell, “The European Union: Eastern Partnership Vs. Eurasian Union,” in Putin’s
Grand Strategy” the Eurasian Union and its Discontents, eds. S. Frederick Starr and Svante E. Cornell
(Washington, DC: The Central Asia-Caucasus Institute, 2014), 186.
239 Gordadze, Georgian-Russian Relations in the 1990s, 46. The 2005 “Tulip Revolution” in Kyrgyzstan can also be included in this list, although it was somewhat less worrisome to Moscow due to the Central Asian nation’s physical remoteness from Europe.
240 Ronald D. Asmus, A Little War that Shook the World: Georgia, Russia, and the Future of the West (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 108.
of those steps lay with the Russian-Abkhazian-South Ossetian coalition.”241 Controlling
the initiative is critical to ensure the ultimate overt confrontation happens at a time of the aggressor’s deliberate choosing.
The peacekeeping operations and military exercises that Russian conducted in South Ossetia, Abkhazia and along the Russo-Georgian frontier also provided opportunities for Russia to develop the infrastructure that would ultimately support the conventional invasion. The Russian army was able to use the bases for these operations to preposition large numbers of troops and heavy weapons on Georgian soil, and they were able to build support facilities for future operations at the same time. The Russians build a field surgical hospital in Abkhazia that they then turned over to the Abkhazian’s as a “humanitarian” gesture. They stockpiled massive amounts of weapons and ammunition in the forward area as part of their “peacekeeping” footprint. Most tellingly, in April and June 2008, the Russian Army repaired the railway between the Southern Military Zone and Abkhazia.242 Russian forces, particularly armor, are heavily reliant on rail
transportation to deploy throughout the Federation following a mobilization.243 The Railroad Troops finished the repairs on the Abkhazia rail line on July 30th, 2008, a week before the invasion.
After establishing the local strategic goal of dismembering the Georgian state and placing the two breakaway regions under Russian control, Russia needed to cultivate a degree of receptivity toward this outcome amongst the Abkhaz and South Ossetian populations. Russia promoted a narrative of Georgian abuse of minorities to promote anti-Georgia sentiment, while selectively undermining and removing all reconciliatory parties who were willing to bury the hatchet with Georgia.244 Hybrid warfare is greatly
facilitated through the promotion of a separatist movement within the target state’s population. A degree of indigenous local support helps legitimize the aggressor’s efforts,
241 Illarionov, The Russian Leadership’s Preparation for War, 1999–2008, 49. 242 Abkhazia-Path to War, Globalsecurity.org (Nov 2011),
http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/war/abkhazia-1.htm
243 Hedenskog and Pallin, Russian Military Capability in a Ten-Year Perspective - 2013, 44. 244 Asmus, A Little War that Shook the World: Georgia, Russia, and the Future of the West, 73.
and to mask the aggressor’s true intentions, but the actual goals of such a movement are subordinate to the aggressor state’s designs.
2. Masking the Dynamic Change to the Status Quo
As the level of violence escalated in Russia’s hybrid warfare against Georgia, the Russians relied on other events in the world to help mask the signs of an impending conventional invasion. Apart from the use of existing “peacekeeping” forces and exercises to attempt to hide the buildup of troops and arms in and near Georgia, the Russians did little to disguise the fact that an all-out invasion was about to take place. The United States was seemingly caught by surprise when the shooting commenced on August 7th, but Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had just visited Tbilisi to discuss the deteriorating situation, and the Bush administration had repeatedly warned the Georgians against responding to Russian provocations.245 If anything, Russia calculated that it
could get away with an invasion because of other events that were taking place on the world stage. By the summer of 2008, the surge in Iraq was appearing to bear fruit, but it had required the use of five additional brigades and the tour extension of thousands of troops already in the combat zone, all amid continuing cries from American lawmakers that the Iraq War was lost and that the United States was no longer able to deal with a crisis elsewhere in the world.246 Georgia’s most capable fighting force, the 1st Infantry
Division, was also serving in Iraq and subsequently not available to defend against a Russian attack. Moscow was also acutely aware of the impending U.S. Presidential election and the growing American sentiment against military involvement overseas. The potential election of the first black American President was focusing most American media coverage on domestic politics. The media coverage that was not on the pending U.S. election was simultaneously captivated by the implosion of the U.S. economy. In the summer of 2008, the financial market was in freefall as the sub-prime mortgage schemes were collapsing across the banking sector. What little international media coverage could
245 Stephen Blank, “From Neglect to Duress: The West and the Georgian Crisis before the 2008 War,” in The Guns of August 2008: Russia’s War in Georgia, eds. Svante E. Cornell and S. Frederick Starr (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2009), 118–119.
246 Joel Roberts, “Senator Reid on Iraq: ‘This War is Lost,’” CBS News, April 20, 2007, http://www.cbsnews.com/news/senator-reid-on-iraq-this-war-is-lost/.
find a moment on this stage was almost completely devoted to the Summer Olympic Games in Beijing, whose opening ceremonies on August 8thcoincided with the Russian invasion. With a pacifism-inclined Europe, an over-extended American military, and a U.S. public that was largely oblivious to events in the Caucasus, Putin wagered correctly that there would be little international appetite to directly counter his military incursion into Georgia. The Russians would attempt to further reduce international back lash by controlling the narrative of the conflict and assuming the position of the aggrieved victim responding to Georgian aggression.