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EXPERT Q&A — At the 16-year anniversary of Russia’s war against the former Soviet republic of Georgia, many analysts are drawing a line from Moscow’s aggression then to his subsequent aggression in Ukraine. In this analysis, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s actions in Georgia, which were met by a muted response from the West, were in many ways a harbinger of events to come in Ukraine – both in the 2014 invasion of Crimea and the full-scale assault on Ukraine in 2022.
On the debut episode of The Cipher Brief’s new weekly show The World Deciphered, Chief International Correspondent Ia Meurmishvili spoke with Matthew Bryza, a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Europe and Eurasia and former U.S. Ambassador to Azerbaijan, to discuss Russia’s motivations in its invasion of Georgia, and how that brief war has impacted the current, long-running conflict in Ukraine.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
The Cipher Brief: What was the biggest impact of Russia’s 2008 invasion of Georgia?
Bryza: I think the biggest impact that doesn’t pertain just to Georgia is Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and its earlier invasion of Crimea and Donbas. I recall then-Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili saying it in the most succinct way possible: Crimea is next. He said that in April of 2008 and then-French president Nicolas Sarkozy published an op-ed in The Washington Post in which he said, to paraphrase, it’s really terrible that Russia invaded Georgia, and if they do the same thing to Ukraine, then that would be really bad and we would have to react.
So it was as if Sarkozy himself was admitting that Russia already had Ukraine in its sights because of what it did to Georgia. And yet we still didn’t do anything.
The Cipher Brief: And it was not a secret because Putin declared in 2007 that was his plan.
Bryza: Yes. And the April 2008 NATO summit outcome was the worst possible phrasing in terms of Putin’s mindset. The outcome was that Georgia and Ukraine will become members of NATO someday, but not yet. So Putin concluded, act now. And four months later, he did act.
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The Cipher Brief: Is the 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine a part of the same process, part of the same thinking?
Bryza: It is part of the same mentality of Putin, which is to push until stopped. Fight as far as you can go until you can go no further, until there’s a real cost to be paid. And when I was still working in the U.S. government, I always looked at one of my main duties from the perspective of some of our NATO allies – France, Germany, and the UK – as being the Saakashvili manager, meaning that they assumed that President Saakashvili was unstable, irrational, and wanted war with Russia.
So they would say, Well, you know him, you guys have some sort of a friendship, you’re the US, you’ve got to manage him. So that recalls to me, the calculus of Putin.
I made the point to my European colleagues and then to the Russian Deputy Chief of General Staff that you’re always asking us to rein in President Saakashvili. He’s not crazy. He knows Russia’s military is unbeatable, but he’s being maneuvered into a corner. And I remember saying, I don’t know how much longer we can dissuade him from reacting to so many Russian provocations. So my French and German and British counterparts, they didn’t like that. And they just, I don’t know, maybe they assumed that I just wasn’t trying hard enough.
From that moment on, the Russian foreign ministry and the Russian military became unavailable. This was in June of 2008. They could not meet, they said everybody’s on vacation. And that was because they realized that they were going to be able to provoke Georgia and provoke President Saakashvili to respond when they started shooting in South Ossetia.
Now, looking back, we see that it was hybrid war. Russia had begun the conflict way before anyone in the West recognized it was happening.
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The Cipher Brief: So do you think the provocation was avoidable for the Georgians?
Bryza: I do, but maybe not in the way your question foresees. I don’t think there was anything that the Georgian government could have done to avoid this provocation once things got into Russia’s phase of executing the final stage of its plan.
Putin was going to bring Georgia to war one way or the other. The only way it could have been stopped was if we all woke up in Washington, Brussels, Paris, Berlin, London.
Reread Putin’s speech from the 2007 Munich Security Conference, and you realize he meant it. One thing Putin does is he telegraphs what his what his moves are going to be, when they are dramatic foreign policy moves. It’s an uncomfortable thing for me to say, but he’s honest in these cases.
So we were all asleep. And had we been awake, we could have deterred the Russians.
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