Jamestown Foundation Blog: Russia Intensifying Annexation of Georgian Territories

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 30, 2010

Russia Intensifying Annexation of Georgian Territories

By David Iberi

On September 29, 2010, the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Georgiamade a statement accusing the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) troops stationed in the occupied Georgian province of Tskhinvali region/South Ossetia of conducting “illegal ‘border demarcation works,’” which will “further limit free movement in the region for the local population,” including areas adjacent to the line of occupation. The brief statement by the ministry was followed by Georgian media’s own reports claiming that the Russians started to advance deep into Georgian territory that was not previously held by the occupying forces. Some media sources say that the Russians seized “25 hectares” in one Georgian village and “five hectares” and “half a hectare” in two others, leaving some local farmers virtually without land.

A spokesperson for the European Union’s Monitoring Mission to Georgia (EUMM) – the only international body on Georgian soil to monitor the implementation of the 2008 ceasefire agreement between Russian and Georgia – told Civil.ge, Georgia’s online news agency, that the situation in the region was “calm and quiet” and declined to give details “at this stage…as EUMM monitors were currently “looking into the situation.” The EUMM headquarters in Tbilisi has since not made any public comments on the issue.

Representatives of the Russian FSB deployed in the occupied region told the Russian news agency that they are not involved in any demarcation activities on the “border between Georgia and South Ossetia.”

While Russia has put up myriads of obstacles to minimize contact between Georgian citizens on both sides of the occupation line, it has long intensified the process of annexation of the two Georgian territories – Tskhinvali region/South Ossetia and Abkhazia – by improving infrastructure connecting those regions with the Russian Federation. In addition to stationing nearly 10,000 troops in those provinces, almost completely subsidizing the local budgets and directly or indirectly appointing local apparatchiks,building roads, tunnels and bridges across the major Caucasus Ridge has become the important business for the Russian authorities.

On September 27, Gazeta.ru published an interview with Boris Ebzeyev, president of the Russian Republic of Karachay-Cherkessia, who said Russian authorities plan to construct a new road that will link his republic with Abkhazia. According to Ebzeyev, the road will help “Karachay-Cherkessia gain access to the Black Sea via Abkhaz ports… [and] attract more tourists to the region.”

The creation of new infrastructure in the high mountains that separate the North and South Caucasus is apparently part of a Russian military strategy aimed at facilitating faster movement of troops. But no less important are political, social and cultural aspects of those infrastructure projects, since they will further contribute to isolating the occupied provinces from the rest of Georgia and firmly chain them to the Russian territories in the North Caucasus.

Although, arguably, Georgia has limited means at its disposal to counter geostrategic schemes of its nuclear neighbor, it still can take some steps that would raise the international awareness of the situation on the ground and at least slow down Russia’s pace. Georgia should speak more openly on the world stage about Russia’s annexation efforts by making regular reports to the United Nations, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) and the Council of Europe, of which both Georgia and Russia are members. Georgia might as well request that the European Union, as the guarantor of the ceasefire between Russia and Georgia, establishes a fact-finding mission to study the compliance of the parties with the provisions of the agreement.

Jamestown Foundation Blog: Russia Intensifying Annexation of Georgian Territories

Georgia deals with 'occupation' - Washington Times

On the second anniversary of the 2008 war between Russia and Georgia, the government in Tbilisi has accepted Russian occupation of their provinces — for now.

Georgia's state minister for reintegration, Temuri Yakobashvili, said in an exclusive interview that there were contacts between his offices and the de facto authorities in the breakaway provinces of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, and he was focusing on ways to integrate the economies and populations of Georgia and the provinces that are still hosting close to 10,000 Russian soldiers.

"I don't have a crystal ball to tell you about the timeline," Mr. Yakobashvili told The Washington Times. "These are necessary ingredients and policies to deal with a population living under occupation. We have to deal with the population anyway. It will take five years, 15 years or three years, I don't know. It's politics. I believe this does not have to take as long as the unification of Germany after World War II, but it's not going to happen overnight, either."

His view in some ways differs from the Georgian government's position in the aftermath of the war with Russia that began Aug. 7, 2008, when Georgian troops entered South Ossetia, a province that has sought independence from Georgia since the era of the Soviet Union. Russian troops poured into Georgia on Aug. 8, and Russian troops have stayed in South Ossetia and Abkhazia to this day. The local South Ossetian defense minister is a former colonel in the Russian military.

In 2008 and 2009, President Mikhail Saakashvili tried to rally the international community to pressure Russia to abide by a French-brokered cease-fire requiring all troops to return to prewar positions. Russia, however, has kept its soldiers in the Georgian territories and has started to build permanent bases.

On the diplomatic front, Moscow recognized the independence of Abkhazia and South Ossetia shortly after the war and has encouraged allies to do the same.

Deputy Foreign Minister Giga Bokeria, in an interview, said Georgians today view the war as a victory, in the sense that Russia did not succeed in toppling the Saakashvili government and their country is still politically independent from Moscow.

"It has never been about the struggle in the provinces. It was about the whole country," he said. "Those occupied territories are an instrument for Russia to get back control of the region."

For now, a higher priority for Georgia is a diplomatic campaign to persuade other states not to recognize the independence of the two provinces hosting Russian soldiers.

Last month, the International Court of Justice recognized the independence of Kosovo, a majority Albanian province of Serbia that former Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic attempted to cleanse of Albanians.

Georgia deals with 'occupation' - Washington Times

Resetting Georgia - by Brian Whitmore | Foreign Policy

Resetting Georgia

Amid Obama's foreign-policy woes, his subtle handling of Russia’s Tbilisi policy represents a bright spot.

BY BRIAN WHITMORE | AUGUST 9, 2010

TBILISI — Young couples sip wine in sidewalk cafes and children play in fountains, seeking relief from the searing heat. Elsewhere, elderly men play chess on park benches and traders hawk their wares from makeshift kiosks. It's another summer in Georgia's scruffy, chaotic, but charming capital. But there's one change this season: For the first time in years, there are no rumors of war.

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The calm contrasts sharply with the tension that gripped the city during the sweltering summer of 2008. Two years ago this week, brinkmanship between Moscow and Tbilisi culminated in Russia's invasion of Georgia. That invasion resulted in the Russian takeover of the breakaway provinces of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, setting up a tense standoff between Moscow and Tbilisi. Georgians were jittery again last summer when fresh saber rattling in Moscow led politicians and pundits to predict -- incorrectly, it turned out -- that armed conflict would break out again.

The fact that Georgians aren't living in fear of a Russian invasion for the first time in years is an unexpected fringe benefit of U.S. President Barack Obama's "reset" policy with Moscow. It also runs counter to allegations by Obama's critics that countries on Russia's periphery such as Georgia would suffer from Washington's rapprochement with Moscow. These concerns have not merely been limited to Obama's partisan rivals: Eastern European luminaries, including former Czech and Polish presidents Vaclav Havel and Lech Walesa, as well as domestic critics such as former State Department official David Kramer, have raised concerns that Obama's Russia policy would leave former Soviet states at Moscow's mercy.

But after initially expressing similar anxieties, Georgian officials now say that closer ties between the former superpower rivals have allowed Washington to exert quiet, yet effective, influence over Moscow and enhance Tbilisi's security in the process.

Among those praising Obama is Giga Bokeria, Georgia's deputy foreign minister and a close confidant of President Mikheil Saakashvili. "The immediate danger of a large-scale attack by Russia has been -- if not completely eradicated -- significantly reduced by a very active position by the U.S. administration," Bokeria told me recently.

He credits Obama's "very concentrated effort" to make Washington's position on Georgia clear to the Kremlin during his first presidential visit to Russia in July 2009. At the time, Obama said he had "a frank discussion" with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, during which he expressed his "firm belief that Georgia's sovereignty and territorial integrity must be respected."

Senior Georgian officials say the U.S. president was even tougher behind the scenes. They claim Obama warned Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin that Washington wouldn't stand on the sidelines if Russia launched another attack against Georgia. The White House would neither confirm nor deny that account, but people in Tbilisi say whatever was said appears to have had an effect.

U.S. policy toward Russia has functioned not just with sticks, but with carrots, too. Giga Zedania, a political scientist at Tbilisi's Ilia State University, says Russia "should have something to lose" if it attacks Georgia. "One of the problems with the Bush administration was that it had no leverage over Russia, because there was no cooperation," she said. "When these links are established...Russia will have more incentive to think twice before it does something like it did in 2008."

Medvedev's visit to the United States in June, seeking U.S. support for Moscow's bid to join the World Trade Organization, offered a prime example of what Russia now has to lose. The president also visited Silicon Valley to court investors for an ambitious plan to modernize Russia's high-tech sector. Moscow knows it can kiss such goodies goodbye if it misbehaves in Georgia, or elsewhere.

Despite the U.S. engagement, relations are still fraught on the Russia-Georgia border. Russian troops are increasingly entrenched in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, with some troops stationed just 20 miles from Tbilisi. The official policy of the Kremlin, which has long been uncomfortable with Georgian sovereignty, also still calls for regime change in Tbilisi.

But the tense atmosphere of Cold War-style conflict, in which Georgia served as a proxy battleground for the United States and Russia, is clearly fading. And these days, Georgians are asking themselves whether Obama's reset could go even further, facilitating rapprochement, or at least détente, between Moscow and Tbilisi.

Irakli Alasania thinks it can. Georgia's former ambassador to the United Nations, now a leading opposition figure, won widespread praise for his calm and reassuring manner during the Russia-Georgia war two years ago. He told me that if U.S.-Russia relations continue to improve, "it will only benefit Georgia" by facilitating an eventual normalization of relations between Tbilisi and Moscow.

"At this point what we can do is to not solicit any more aggressive behavior from Russia, to keep things quiet," Alasania says. "[W]e need strong partners. And we need our strongest strategic partner to have a good relationship with the Russian Federation."

Saakashvili, whose political brand is bound up with his confrontational stance toward Russia, has been publicly supportive of Obama's reset with Russia, though officials say that, in private, he still has reservations. "We welcome holding of a dialogue between Russia and the United States," the Georgian president said in June shortly before U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's visit to Tbilisi. "The fact [is] that, under conditions of this dialogue, the United States remains committed to its principled position" on Georgia's territorial integrity.

The Obama administration must remain vigilant in defending Georgia's sovereignty and territorial integrity. It should also continue to show Moscow that it has much more to gain by respecting its neighbors -- and much to lose by threatening them.

Whether this proves sufficient in the long run is still uncertain. But speaking softly and carrying a big carrot has so far proved to be an effective policy in the volatile South Caucasus.

Resetting Georgia - by Brian Whitmore | Foreign Policy

How Russia's FSB Colonized Abkhazia - Newsweek

The Republic of Spies

Abkhazia, one of the breakaway provinces over which Russia and Georgia fought in 2008, has been colonized by Russia’s state security services. And the locals are hardly thrilled.

Valery Matytsin / ITAR-TASS-Landov

The former Hotel Abkhazia in Sukhumi.

On a sunny afternoon earlier this summer in the garden of a freshly renovated resort overlooking the Black Sea, a group of Russian security-service and Interior Ministry officers on holiday were raising their vodka glasses. The toast: to their future summers in the separatist republic of Abkhazia, once a favorite holiday spot for Stalin’s elite and now, despite its nominal independence from Georgia, Russia’s newest colony. After a war in 2008 to help Abkhazia and South Ossetia partition themselves from Georgia, Russia is making itself right at home.

The party’s host, Alexander Tsyshba—the head of the privatization and investments department for the seaside city of Gagra—looked satisfied. After over 15 years of economic blockade by Georgia, investment in Abkhazia was almost nonexistent, the resorts were empty, and the economy was stagnant except for a trickle of business controlled by Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB). Now, with 3,000 Russian troops stationed in the republic, Tsyshba’s old FSB friends have begun to buy up prime property across the breakaway republic. “To buy property in Abkhazia, the FSB officers use the special relationship of their long-term contacts with us,” he explains with a smile.

The Russian special services’ “special relationship” with Abkhazia began well before the region’s break from Georgia in 1991, in the days of the Soviet KGB. From Stalin’s era on, every other Abkhaz family had a KGB officer, a secret agent, or an informer among their relatives. Former agents told NEWSWEEK that Moscow gave the tiny South Caucasus republic a special status—of an autonomous republic within the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic—in order for the KGB to have a pleasant headquarters in the palm-lined seaside boulevards of Sukhumi. Locals like to boast that “Abkhazia used to beat the world record on the number of secret agents per capita,” says Lavrik Mikvabia, a colonel in the Abkhaz border guard. And Vladimir Rubanov, a three-star general who ran the old KGB’s analytical department, told NEWSWEEK that “the KGB always had its special power in Abkhazia. When I came for vacation and went out for a beer with my friend, a senior Abkhaz KGB commander, we did not have to pay for our beers or a plate of crabs. We just showed our KGB IDs.”

Traditions are respected in the Caucasus. So nobody was surprised when the FSB, the successor agency to the KGB, inherited the Mayak sanitarium, a former KGB rehabilitation center for agents, after the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991. Or when officers of the Federal Protection Service, the agency guarding the president and other top officials, brought their families to spend summers at the dacha that Khrushchev once used—a strictly guarded, enormous resort covering more than 10 square kilometers of seafront property in Pitsunda. Now a rotating cast of former and current FSB officers has arrived to rent and privatize luxury hotels, sanitariums, and dachas on prestigious bits of land.

In the two years since Russia went to war to “liberate” Abkhazia and South Ossetia from the Republic of Georgia, the Russification in those provinces has accelerated. Almost all the best Abkhaz architectural monuments have ended up in the hands of Russian investors: the 19th-century palace of the Prince of Oldenburg; Olga’s Tower; another graceful palace in the Mauritanian style in the hills overlooking the city; and Gagra’s oldest landmark, the ancient Persian Attaba Fortress, dating to the fourth and fifth centuries. Luxurious real-estate developments like the Dolfin Hotel, which opened last January, have emerged along the seafront, waking Pitsunda’s tourist industry from years of comatose postwar decay. Tsyshba, the Gagra privatization guru, proudly boasts that the city is “the best FSB resort.”

The Dolfin Hotel’s manager, Alexander Chukbar, agrees, but he adds warily that the new owners “are not the kind of people one can just go up to and chat with.” In Soviet days, the KGB was a state within a state. Now, with former KGB officer Vladimir Putin and his circle of former spooks still very much in control of the country, the FSB’s hand extends into almost every major Russian business. Former KGB officers turned businessmen are warmly welcomed in their old Abkhaz stomping grounds—and have brought billions of dollars of investment. Rosneft, Russia’s state oil company famous for its ties to the Russian security establishment, arrived this year to open an office in Sukhumi and begin a $32 million geological-research program offshore in the Black Sea, considered a prospective oil-rich region.

Other groups in the Russian elite have also followed the spooks’ lead. Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov has lost no time grabbing a massive piece of land outside Gagra for a $70 million resort complex the locals call “Project Moscow.” Luzhkov is also constructing a gigantic office in Sukhumi to coordinate investments from Moscow, to be called the Moscow Center. Russia’s Ministries of Defense, Agriculture, and the Interior have reclaimed state dachas in Sukhumi, Gagra, and Gudauta so that their employees can vacation there. Alexander Tkachev, the governor of Krasnodar region in southern Russia, has spent the last two summers in the dacha built by Stalin’s secret police chief; he rents it from the local government, which can’t afford to renovate it. And Sergei Kiriyenko, the head of Russia’s nuclear-energy agency, owns a winery in Abkhazia, according to the local administration.

But the biggest investor of all is Prime Minister Putin, who visited Abkhazia last summer for the war’s first anniversary, and pledged $500 million in state aid to strengthen Abkhaz defense. He has also promised millions for a huge project to redevelop the town of Pitsunda, famous for its enormous old pine trees—beloved by the tsars, the Soviets, and the new Russian elites alike. The Russian government is planning to build what Astamur Ketsba, head of the regional administration, calls “Putin City”—a lavish luxury resort with a port for yachts, health clubs, and private beaches. It is expected to be ready in time for the 2014 Winter Olympics in nearby Sochi. In the meantime, Abkhaz President Sergei Bagapsh told NEWSWEEK that he has already received 300 million rubles of 9 billion offered, and that he has reached an agreement with Putin that will allow Russian citizens to own private property in Abkhazia. He boasted that the airport Sukhumi will open next month is better than the one in Sochi, and that soon, Russian S-300 surface-to-air missiles will be stationed in his breakaway republic.

Not all the locals are happy about the invasion of Russian money, fearing an assault on their newly won independence. Tomara Lakrba, the main architect of the towns of Gagra and Pitsunda, says she was “astonished” when she saw the proposed designs for Putin City, which—with more than 10 stories (where three or four are normal)—she considered tall and ugly. “I realized that Russian security services gave us our independence in order to be able to decide what to buy and build in our cities,” she says.

Many young Abkhaz also feel concerned about the Russian elite buying up their proud, small state. “I do not think Russians understand that we are different; we do not want to be a KGB state again. We would never give our land back to Georgia, but to be independent, we mean from Russia as well,” says Akhra Smyr, a youth community activist in Sukhumi. He and other irritated young activists shared with NEWSWEEK their frustration about how Russian tanks destroyed the roads in the Gali region and how their international phone code has become +7, the same as Russia’s.

Abkhazia’s tiny military also feels steamrollered by the FSB, which has taken over controlling the border with Georgia. There are only two checkpoints (of more than a dozen) left under Abkhaz control, and some 120 Abkhaz officers have lost their jobs. Sixty were fired outright and 60 were turned into customs agents. “We are all war veterans,” says the commander of Abkhaz border troops, Col. Lavrik Mikvabia. “We spilled blood for our freedom. The FSB border officers should remember that when they treat us as if we were their colony.”

It seems too late, though, for the Abkhaz to reconsider their pact with their powerful northern neighbor. Abkhazia’s border with Georgia is secured by a full division of Russia’s border guards, who answer to the FSB. Bright orange trucks—with the double-headed-eagle logo of the Russian Federal Construction Co.—crawl along the coastal roads, carrying sand and gravel for the seven-story buildings the FSB is building for the border guards and their families in Gali, a regional center on the border with Georgia.

With so much Russian money being poured into Abkhazia, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s calls for the Russian military’s immediate withdrawal ring a little hollow. Never mind the ceasefire terms that ended the war, under which Moscow promised to withdraw. “Russia has just arrived,” President Bagapsh told NEWSWEEK. The West should “stop having any illusions about what they call Russian occupiers leaving any time soon.”