WHAT DOES RUSSIA WANT IN THE WEST PART OF THE CAUCASUS?
by Igor Chirnov-Rezakin
Center for Research on Globalization
hp?context=va&aid=9886
Global Research
Aug 20 2008
Canada
Global Research Editor’s Note:
This article was published prior to the Georgian attack on South
Ossetia on August 7, 2008
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Russia should concentrate on promoting the idea of making Georgia
a confederation.
Summer’2008 in the west part of the Caucasus began traditionally –
with provocations against Russian peacekeepers, explosions in Gagry,
ritual aggressive statements from Tbilisi…
According to special services, what Georgia procured in terms
of military hardware (or what it received as a gift from Russia’s
"partners") over the years include almost 400 armored vehicles (half
of them tanks), almost 200 artillery pieces and mortars (including
volley-fire rocket launchers and Howitzers 152 mm caliber), 25
antiaircraft complexes and 200 portable missile launchers, 45 aircraft
and helicopters (eight of them drones), 10 boats, light weapons,
radios, earth-moving machinery for military engineers, uniforms,
munitions by the ton… Georgia has no external enemies and nobody
aspires to its territory or part of it, but arms expenditures grow
with each passing year.
The Hard facts:
Russia withdrew its troops from Georgia by late 2007;
Euro-Atlantic crisis-resolution specialists frantically chart the
plans to integrate the Caucasus into NATO and "united" Europe. All
these plans stand for absorption of Abkhazia and South Ossetia by
Georgia but also include some attractive (or so they authors think)
offers to Abkhazian and South Ossetian leaders.
And what about Russia? What does it need in and from the west part
of the Caucasus?
First, it must be made quite plain to everyone that Russia does not
want a single square meter of the former Georgian Soviet Socialist
Republic! Strategically speaking, any part of Georgia is nothing
Russia needs.
Second (but much more significantly), Russia cannot permit
the transformation of the neighbor territory into a multipurpose
anti-Russian bridgehead: with separatist bases, velvet revolutions lab,
GUAM’s locomotive force, and NATO barracks all rolled into one.
What Russia needs is:
A safe transit route to Armenia by land. Now that Adjaria is lost
(actually, abandoned) and Russian troops no longer man the Batumi
-Akhalkalaki line, strategic transit to Armenia as Russia’s only ally
in the Caucasus depends on Armenia’s neighbors. These latter include
hostile Azerbaijan, neutral Iran, NATO member Turkey, and fiercely
pro-NATO Georgia. The Karabakh conflict settlement plan one of NATO’s
"experts" charted involved exchange of territories between Armenia and
Azerbaijan so as to cut the former off Iran. Air ferry service is not
an option because Russia’s transport aviation is not up to it. Even
Russian trucks with relief aid barely make it across civilized Europe
to Serbia. Armenia meanwhile is where Russia has the 102nd Military
Base and some strategic enterprises under its control and management.
Poti is out of the question as a base for the Russian Black Sea Fleet
no matter how it ends with Ukraine (the so called 2017 problem). It
is clear that neither Poti not revamped Novorossiisk will do even if
the Black Sea Fleet is downsized to a mere flotilla!
Prices in the global oil and gas market draw attention to oil and
gas exports from the Caspian basin to the West bypassing the Russian
territory. Georgia is playing a central part in these plans. Baku-Supsa
and Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipelines are already running. Whenever they
recall it, Russian state officials get mad and regularly deploy the so
called "administrative resource" even though every such attempt costs
Russia dearly. Suspend the transit so as to change the anti-Russian
vector? But why? Oil export is business. One may make money in oil
fields development or in shipment or oil refining – as long as the
terms are acceptable (which is always easier to assure than enforcing
of the ban).
The safety of transit pipelines may be turned over to "private
armies". Why wouldn’t we draw on our Anglo-Saxon "partners"
‘experience?
The attempt in the early 1990s to rebuild the Georgian micro-empire,
an analog of the one remembered from 1918, created a crisis that
continues to this day.
A confederation as the natural – is not only – solution is not
something anybody has been giving a thought to. This state of affairs
offers Russia a chance to become the settlement leader in the region
with an emphasis on precisely this idea.
Seizing the initiative in the west part of the Caucasus, Russia may
even rejuvenate integration all over the rest of the Commonwealth and
elevate these processes to another level. Consider Europe. It never
occurs to Georgia to return Alsatia and Lorraine. It never occurs to
Italy to part with Nice or Austria with South Tirol.
Russia’s success in the Caucasus will put an end to development of
"sanitary cordons" along its own borders. Success in the Crimea and
Ukraine will even wreck beyond repair NATO’s and European Union’s
plans to expand eastward, into the zone of Russia’s national interests.