A Second Hand Conjecture

Russia has invaded Western Georgia (proper) and captured Senaki, far from Abkhazia. It’s being billed by a Russian official as a preventive move against Georgian troop concentration. This being yet another new rationale invented on the fly to justify further incursion and murder. Remember when this was about South Ossetia peacekeeping?

For trivia, the military base at Senaki was where the 1998 mutiny against Eduard Shevardnadze was organized. Yesterday Wu Wei was amusingly speculating that he’d be dusted off by the Kremlin as Georgia’s eventual pro-Moscow puppet.

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The point has been made more than once that the Russian incursion into South Ossetia is ideologically motivated as a retaliatory gesture for Kosovo independence. Wu Wei makes a fine point about why this is not plausible if so:

The Kosovo Albanians had had 10 years of oppression by Slobodan Milosovic in Yugoslavia before it broke up, and there had been wars provoked by him in Croatia and Bosnia, with charges of genocide generally accepted now. So people knew exactly what he was planning when he started driving Albanians out of Kosovo. And there were something like 2 million Albanians driven out of Kosovo across the border into Albania and Macedonia. Without the bombing he would not have stopped.

Bigger is not better, and war is never right. But Saakashvili, with all his faults is not Milosovic.
(Wu Wei)

True in the immediate, but there’s an underlying historical dissonance to the Russian claim as well. Kosovo is after all, the Serbian ethnic homeland. The churches of the old Serbian kings are still the dominant architectural element of the ancient towns in that country and Serbia has hereditary claims to these southern lands which predate written records. The loss of them is just as ancient a grievance, given that their uprising against the Ottomans in 1690s is what sent them north.

The key difference here is that any South Ossetian claim to Russian identification is as young as 1801 at the earliest. As for the ethnically Russian emigrees, that mostly goes back to the 20th century. These are not comparable claims for Russian territorial identity upon the land.

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Wu Wei believes Russia is now targeting the Nabucco gas pipeline in Georgia…while the Russian NATO envoy argues that strategic objectives are restricted to a South Ossetia protection and warns NATO to stay out. And now Iran gets into the ceasefire call game.

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