SUBSCRIBER+EXCLUSIVE REPORTING — It was a brief war with long-lasting consequences. Sixteen years ago this month, Russian forces invaded Georgia, in what some experts described as the first attempt to change internationally recognized state borders by force in Europe since 1945.
Today many analysts believe the Russo-Georgian War of 2008 was also the first example of Vladimir Putin’s policy aimed at restoring Moscow’s influence over the former republics of the Soviet Union, a policy that has been on full display in Ukraine.
“The reverberations and the ripples from 2008 bounce up and down every day,” Jim Townsend, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense, told The Cipher Brief. “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.”
Townsend and others see a through line from the Russian war against Georgia to its current full-scale war on Ukraine.
A five-day war
The Russian war in Georgia began in the first week of August 2008, in a nation that had declared its independence nearly two decades earlier, during the waning days of the Soviet Union.
The Soviet state had lost its influence over the so-called East Bloc nations in a series of revolutions in 1989, and soon after, several Soviet republics moved to split from Moscow. The republic of Georgia declared independence in April 1991 following a referendum, and the Soviet Union itself ceased to exist eight months later.
Civil strife erupted almost immediately in the Georgian breakaway regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, followed by an uneasy peace that persisted in both parts of the country. A staunchly pro-Western government took power in Georgia in 2003, and relations between Tbilisi and Moscow deteriorated, reaching crisis levels when NATO pledged at its 2008 Summit to consider Georgia’s bid to join the alliance.
Matthew Bryza, a former senior White House and State Department official who served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State, told The Cipher Brief that when the summit concluded that “Georgia and Ukraine will become members of NATO someday, but not yet,” that sent a signal to Putin to “act now,” before Georgia was actually offered NATO membership. “And four months later? He did act.”
On August 1, 2008, Russian-backed South Ossetian forces began shelling Georgian villages. Georgia launched a military response. Russia then accused Georgia of committing genocide against the people of South Ossetia – a charge Putin would repeat against Ukraine in 2022. Subsequently, Moscow launched a full-scale invasion of Georgia.
The military operation lasted just five days. Russian forces invaded much of Georgia, pushing to within 25 miles of the capital, Tbilisi. Russia also used cyberattacks against the Georgian government.
Then-French president Nicolas Sarkozy negotiated a ceasefire agreement, which required Russia to withdraw to pre-war positions and allow unimpeded humanitarian aid access to the conflict zone. Critics said the deal was in Moscow’s favor.
Experts believe the short war gave the world its first view of just how Moscow would deliver on ambitions announced by Russian President Vladimir Putin in a speech at the Munich Security Conference in 2007.
“The process of NATO expansion has nothing to do with modernization of the alliance,” Putin said then. “We have the right to ask, ‘Against whom is this expansion directed?’”
More broadly, the Russian president argued that the world was not ruled by Western values alone, and signaled that Russia would act as it saw fit
“Putin was going to bring Georgia to war one way or the other,” Bryza said. “The only way it could have been stopped was if we all woke up in Washington, Brussels, Paris, Berlin, London.”
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How Ukraine today mirrors Georgia then
Russia's military aggression seemed to go largely unanswered by the West. As for the ceasefire deal, Russia failed to comply with the terms, and no real consequences were ever imposed against Moscow.
To this day, the Russian militarily occupies 20 percent of Georgia’s internationally recognized territory. Russia continues to slowly seize more territory through the creeping advance of a process termed “borderization,” in which Russian forces slowly move fences that delineate the border of Russian-occupied territory. Russia has also continued to build up its military presence in Abkhazia and South Ossetia.
Experts now say that the muted international response to Georgia only encouraged President Putin to keep going, which he did in Ukraine in 2014 — ordering the invasion of Crimea and swaths of Eastern Ukraine in 2014 — and then again with his full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
Putin’s declared goal for his “special military operation” in 2022 was to “demilitarize and denazify” Ukraine to prevent what he called a “genocide” against Russians in eastern Ukraine. Earlier, Putin had said the Russian occupation of Crimea was needed “to ensure proper conditions for the people of Crimea to be able to freely express their will.” Ukraine, supported by outside analysts and historians, has said Russia used these baseless arguments to justify its aggression.
Bryza believes the Ukraine story echoes Russia’s playbook in Georgia.
The Ukraine war “is part of the same mentality of Putin, which is to push until stopped,” Bryza said. “Fight as far as you can go until you can go no further, until there's a real cost to be paid.”
Looking back, Bryza and others say the West was slow to realize that as of early 2007, Putin was leading Russia into a new post-Cold War strategy.
The U.S. and many Europeans had been pressing for improved relations with a new, post-Soviet regime in Moscow, even suggesting at times that Russia be brought into NATO and other major European institutions. Many of those leaders failed to see the proverbial writing on the wall – namely, that Putin had already charted a course for Russia that did not embrace engagement with the West, but favored a revisionist path, and a strategy of hybrid warfare that the West would be too slow to recognize.
“I think it has taken years, frankly, 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,” Townsend said.
“We did not have a good appreciation for what we were dealing with. And that mistake amplified and replicated itself in Ukraine and in other aspects of the Russian-European, US relationship.”
Cipher Brief Researcher Ethan Masucol contributed to this report.
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