
The US, Europe and a Ukraine-Russia peace deal
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EXPERT Q&A — In August 2008, Russia attacked the former Soviet republic of Georgia in a war that lasted only five days but brought lasting consequences for the region. Experts say the war was an early test by Russian President Vladimir Putin of his aim to reassert Moscow’s influence over the nations that won their independence when the Soviet Union ceased to exist in 1991. Those same experts believe the war against Georgia was a precursor of the 2014 and 2022 Russian invasions of Ukraine.
On the debut episode of The Cipher Brief’s new weekly show The World Deciphered, Chief International Correspondent Ia Meurmishvili spoke with Jim Townsend, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for European and NATO Policy, to discuss the lessons from the Russo-Georgian War of 2008 for Russia’s ongoing war against Ukraine and its future ambitions.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Meurmishvili: What has changed since Russia’s invasion of Georgia?
Townsend: Things have changed, at least in the West. After the invasion of Georgia, the NATO allies and the United States didn’t quite appreciate what had just happened. For whatever reason, this absolute insult to the Western agreements about boundaries and how the European nations were going to deal with one another, wasn’t seen as something that merited a forceful response by the West.
It has taken years for us to wake up to the fact Putin is not the person that we assumed he was beginning in 2000, and that Russia is going in a different direction.
So the change is really in the West and at NATO and in the United States. Not so much with Russia. They kept going from 2008 and they never stopped.
Meurmishvili: Do you think there are any lessons that the West learned after the 2008 invasion of Georgia?
Townsend: The lesson is that you can’t pick and choose when you’re going to react with force to something that has happened, like the invasion of Georgia. Not that the military is the solution for every incident, but there seem to be a lot of mistaken assumptions made about Russia, about what the Russian invasion of Georgia meant, and what the appropriate response was.
Certainly there had to be preparations within the West to understand that the West was dealing with a different Russia, that the time of assimilating Russia, bringing Russia into Europe, making Russia a member of NATO – all these aspirations from the early 1990s, which were legitimate after the end of the Cold War, they were clung to for too long. And so the lesson is that no matter how bitter the pill is, you can’t cling to something from the past like we did. It has only hurt us in the future, to handle the situation we have now with Russia.
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Meurmishvili: Do you think we’re using that changed mindset as we look at the war in Ukraine?
Townsend: Well, I think there’s a couple things happening. One is, certainly in the West and among NATO allies, we have tried to improve our military capabilities. We’ve been showering Ukraine with assistance and defense spending has jumped up for most countries. So there’s some good things that happened, but there’s a lot of wheel-spinning as well. Lessons have been learned, lessons are being applied. They’re being applied not consistently among every country.
I don’t think we’re going to really be able to understand how well we’ve understood those lessons until the next crisis happens, and maybe we’ll be better prepared at that point. But right now it’s a scramble. And we’ve had some good components and some components that just are not fixed. And we’ll just have to hope that we’ll have time to get these things back in order before Russia decides to find another victim.
Meurmishvili: Do you think Georgia can be a target or a victim of Russian military aggression?
Townsend: Well, internal to Georgia, as we know, there’s political fighting over Georgia’s future. And so if the pro-Moscow camp seems to win the day and be inculcated into the Georgian government, it probably won’t be the subject of a Russian military invasion.
But certainly Russia will have its influence and have its talons in Georgia, manipulating Georgian officials, manipulating Georgian society. So while they might not feel a military aggression, they will certainly feel the hot breath of Moscow breathing down their necks. So we’ll have to see how the politics in Georgia goes for the long term.
It’s a perilous position for the Georgian people to be in. And I just wish they had been in NATO and the EU earlier on, to be better positioned to handle this pressure from Russia. But right now they have been wounded by 2008 and it puts them not necessarily in a good position to handle the future.
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Meurmishvili: Do you think there are any lasting geopolitical effects of that short five-day war to today’s European context?
Townsend: Absolutely. The reverberations and the ripples from 2008 bounce up and down every day, because it was that invasion that gave Putin a better taste for how well his military could perform and how he might conduct his next active aggression, which was the invasion of Crimea. I think he learned from Georgia that he needed to have a different tactic.
And the lessons learned from Georgia shaped the response in 2022. We didn’t do what we did in 2014, which was to talk about sanctions and not lethal assistance. I think we saw this time around, with the 2022 invasion, that we needed to come in harder, and lethally.
And so those experiences from Georgia impacted how we responded to Russia and it impacted how Putin shaped his next acts of aggression. We did not have a good appreciation for what we were dealing with (in 2008). And that mistake amplified and replicated itself in Ukraine and in other aspects of the Russian, European, and U.S. relationships.
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