The French newspaper Le Monde said that Russia is using the same methods, strategy and justifications against Ukraine today, and it works with the same logic that it dealt with Georgia in 2018, relying on the negativity of the West. Therefore, this country and Europe are paying the price for ignoring the Georgian lesson.
In her column in the newspaper, Sylvie Kaufman said that the comparison made by former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev during the meeting of the Russian Security Council dedicated to the Donbass region on February 21 is devastating for Western democracies, and will go down in history as the greatest televised moment representing authoritarian rule, and this is related to what happened in Georgia, which occupied Russian forces 20% of its territory in a blitzkrieg after Moscow recognized two small separatist republics in it.
"I remember very well in 2008 when we decided to recognize Abkhazia and South Ossetia, we saved hundreds of thousands of lives, the danger today is greater, there are more people, we know what will happen next, we know the sanctions and pressure, but we also know how We respond. If we know how to be patient, they will get tired and return to us to talk about security and strategic stability. Russia must recognize the independence of the Donbass republics. Experience says that tension will decrease.”
Medvedev did not bother - as the writer says - to name those involved, because the Kremlin internalized the behavior of the Europeans since that disastrous precedent, and in his mind they (Westerners) would condemn, threaten and punish, and then move on to another matter.
The Europeans and the French president at the time, Nicolas Sarkozy, were the leaders of the maneuver in the Georgian episode that sounded the alarm in many ways for the current Ukrainian drama, because US President George W. Bush was at the end of his term, and delegated crisis management to the European Union, of which France was holding its rotating presidency.
proven strategy
As for the most disturbing thing, it is Russia’s behavior - according to the writer - because whoever reconsiders the Georgian crisis and restores the tape of facts will find that all the elements of the crisis that Putin is now raising in Ukraine already exist, the strategy has been tested, the geopolitical framework has been prepared, and everything is written, and therefore it was It is enough to read the script.
After Putin came to power in 2000 - as Kaufman says - the attacks of September 11, 2001 gave him hope for cooperation with the United States, but the war in Iraq thwarted that, then the "color revolutions" brought the Democrats to power in 2003 and 2004, in The Rose Revolution” in Georgia, and the “Orange Revolution” in Ukraine.
These two revolutions constituted a turning point for the Russian leader, who saw that these two countries looked to the West, especially since the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the European Union at that time were in the process of integrating Central European countries.
Therefore, Putin delivered a speech at the Munich Security Conference in 2007 that showed extreme hostility to NATO expansion, which sparked some frustration among Westerners, and because of him, Bush Jr., at the NATO summit in Bucharest in 2008, retracted the announcement of the expected membership of Ukraine and Georgia in the alliance due to the opposition of Sarkozy and Chancellor Angela Merkel Therefore, in order not to anger Moscow, a weak compromise was adopted specifying that Ukraine and Georgia aspire to NATO membership without specifying a timetable for that, but Moscow saw only the first part of this equation.
At the end of July 2008, pro-Russian separatists bombed a village and soldiers in the South Ossetia region, which made Georgia into a trap when it sent reinforcements against the separatists. Russia intervened by deploying 40,000 soldiers, 20,000 of them in South Ossetia and the same in Abkhazia, and within Days Georgian forces were crushed.
The same scenario in Ukraine
At the beginning of the attack, which was accompanied by electronic attacks, on the day of the opening of the Beijing Olympics, Sarkozy called Medvedev with a proposal to go to Moscow, and after negotiations there he returned with an incomplete agreement, but it allowed to stop the progress of the Russian forces. “Vladimir Putin kept his promise,” forgetting that Russia pulled the rug from under him by recognizing the independence of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, even though it still occupies them to this day under the pretext of stopping the “genocide” perpetrated by Georgia against the Russians, says the writer.
The writer cautioned that this is the same imaginary accusation used today against Ukraine in the Donbass, where Medvedev provided another justification that is now familiar, the field of "distinctive interests" that Russia intends to maintain "in certain regions".
In another book entitled "A Small War that Shook the World", the American Ronald Asmus - who was a member of the administration of former President Bill Clinton - paints a less seductive picture of Sarkozy when he writes that Russia "forcibly modified the borders of a sovereign state, and allowed ethnic cleansing to create entities more ethnically homogeneous." It only partially respected the terms of the ceasefire signed by its president, and no one held it accountable."