The United States has warned that Russia's continued presence in Georgia would damage its relations with the West.
United States of America is rethinking its relations with Russia following the latter's invasion of Georgia. Though the Washington has ruled out any military engagement with Russia over the Georgian conflict, the Pentagon, however, will deliver aid to the Black Sea state of Georgia. However, US will send non-combat force in Georgia to provide relief to a friendly nation that has got a drubbing at the Russian hands after they had committed excesses in the breakaway South Ossetia.
US defence secretary Robert Gates, however, has warned that Russia's invasion of Georgia might could harm its relations with the west for years. The war with Georgia may also cost Russia in terms its strategic relation with the USA and Europe. Though Russia has always been nervous about the installation of Nato missiles in Poland, the USA had assured that those were aimed not Russia, but the nuclear ambitious Iran. But the scenario has changed. The mutual suspicion will further deepen after the USA and Poland have put aside their buried the hatchet and Warsaw has now agreed to station 10 US interceptor missiles on its own soil aiming whom, Iran or Russia, under the pretext of US missile defence system in the Baltic region.
The US is supposed reportedly supply Poland with Patriot missiles, build a permanent US military base in the country, and provide mutual security guarantees.
The deal will enrage Moscow, which is vehemently opposed to the US facilities in Poland and a radar station in the neighbouring Czech Republic.
But why is Russia taking such risks? Is their aim in the current war with Georgia more than what meets the eye, for example, to help the South Ossetians against whom the Georgian president Mikhail Mikhail Saaskashvili has allegedly done wrong? Jeffrey White of The Christian Science Monitor analyses what worked below the surface of the conflict.
Russia's invasion of Georgian territory last week, in addition to reasserting Moscow's military strength, has complicated Europe's effort to diversify its oil and gas supplies away from the growing dominance of Kremlin-controlled energy giant Gazprom.
In the post-Soviet era, and particularly since 9/11, Central Asia has become a central focus for Western countries looking for more secure energy sources.
But this week's offensive, during which British Petroleum shut down an oil pipeline and temporarily stopped pumping gas through Georgia, has called into question plans for a Eurasian corridor free from Russian interference.
"The Caspian region is wondering what this means for the future," says Giorgi Vashakmadze, an energy executive in Georgia. "Russia is showing it controls this corridor."
The Russo-Georgian conflict is the latest in a series of setbacks for Europe's planned Nabucco pipeline - its best hope of weaning itself off Gazprom, which set off alarm bells by cutting crucial gas supplies to the continent in the winters of 2006 and 2008.
Hype surrounding Nabucco has grown more measured in recent months over concerns about the extent of available gas reserves.
Barring the construction of a pipeline under the Caspian Sea, the only way for Europe to get gas from the region is to tap pipelines that originate in either Russia or Iran, as Nabucco may have to do.
Europe's demand for gas is expected to rise more than 50 percent by 2025, according to the US Deparment of Energy.
"There is not enough gas in the region," says Fariborz Ghadar, an energy specialist and director of Penn State's Center for Global Business Studies. "The Nabucco pipeline now is dependent not only on gas from the Caucuses and from east of the Caspian, but also from Iran."
That prospect is unpalatable for the US, which continues to press Iran on its nuclear ambitions. The State Department this week told Turkey, which is hosting Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, that it would withdraw its support - seen as politically important - for Nabucco if the pipeline pumps Iranian gas.
Europeans, meanwhile, harp more on the involvement of Russia, which already supplies Europe with 20 to 40 percent of its gas. Gazprom is expected to feed Nabucco through its Blue Stream pipeline, which would meet it in Turkey, and the company already owns a 50 percent stake in Austria's Baumgarten gas hub, where Nabucco would eventually end.
"This goes against the whole concept of Nabucco, that it would not be either Russian or Russian-controlled gas," says Zeyno Baran, an energy and Central Asian expert at the conservative Hudson Institute in Washington.
Nabucco is expected to be online by 2013, pumping gas along a 2,050-mile route from Georgia to Austria, which would then distribute the gas across Europe. But the six-year-old project has been mired in setbacks this year.
In January, Bulgaria and Hungary inked a deal supporting Gazprom's South Stream pipeline, which would run parallel to Nabucco. In February, the six-member consortium of European energy companies overseeing Nabucco's construction pushed back ground-breaking one year, to 2010, citing environmental-study delays. In May, it announced that the pipeline's cost had increased nearly 60 percent, largely due to rising steel prices. And to date, Nabucco has only received one supply order, from Bulgaria, but only for 1 billion cubic meters (bcm) of Nabucco's expected 35 bcm capacity.
The frankness with which Nabucco authorities are now talking about Russian involvement as a supplier, represents a shift from the political to the pragmatic.
"Nabucco was not planned to be an anti-Russian project, but to be a pro-European project," says Christian Dolezel, a Nabucco spokesman. "The main focus is to transport gas from alternative sources."
Earlier, when the skirmishes started in South Ossetia, Fred Weir and Paul Rimple, of csmonitor reported:
At stake are Russia's already strained relations with the West, which backs Georgia, as well as Georgian President Mikhael Saakashvili's hopes of leading his country into the NATO alliance within the next year. An extended conflict might also hit global energy prices, if a crucial pipeline that carries Caspian oil and gas through Georgia to Western markets should be threatened.
After weeks of escalating skirmishes along the frontier between Georgia and South Ossetia, Georgian forces launched a full-scale invasion on Friday. By nightfall, they claimed to have occupied the capital, Tskhinvali, and about 70 percent of the rebel republic's territory.
A Georgian military spokesman said the fighting would go on until "constitutional order" was restored, meaning Tbilisi's full control. South Ossetia's rebel president, Eduard Kokoity, was quoted by Russian state TV as saying that 1,400 civilians died Friday in the Georgian military offensive.
But hopes of a swift Georgian victory -- on a day when the world's attention was diverted by the opening of the Beijing Olympics -- disappeared when armored elements of the Russian 58th Army poured through the Roki Tunnel, which separates the Russian republic of North Ossetia from South Ossetia, and Russian fighter planes began pounding Georgian positions in and around the rebel republic.
Both sides blamed the other for starting the conflict.
Moscow has long supported South Ossetia and another Georgian rebel statelet, Abkhazia, and maintains a contingent of peacekeeping troops in both. The two republics won de facto independence through bitter civil wars in the early 1990s, and have since lived in legal limbo, unrecognized by the world community, which supports Georgia's claim of sovereignty over the whole territory of Soviet-era Georgia.
But two key developments have pushed these formerly "frozen conflicts" into the spotlight in recent months. The West's backing for Kosovo's independence from Serbia earlier this year, over Russian objections, created what Moscow calls a precedent for other breakaway territories. And the US-backed push to expand NATO into the former Soviet Union, taking in Ukraine and Georgia, has met ferocious resistance in Moscow. For Russia, the existence of breakaway territories in Georgia is a prime argument, frequently repeated by Mr. Medvedev to Western leaders, against Georgia's admission to NATO.
"Russia cannot allow Georgia to solve the South Ossetia problem by military means," says Irina Zvigelskaya, an expert with the independent Center for Strategic and International Studies in Moscow. "Of course the deaths of Russian peacekeepers and the destruction caused by the invading Georgians is an important reason why Medvedev has ordered Russian forces to intervene in the conflict. But there are bigger strategic reasons behind that. Moscow cannot let Saakashvili succeed in his gamble."
Saakashvili called on the Georgian Army to mobilize up to 100,000 reservists, while the chief of Georgia's security council, Kakha Lomaia, said that Georgia plans to withdraw its 1,000 troops currently serving with the US-led coalition in Iraq to meet urgent national security needs at home.
"It is absolutely clear that this was a long-planned offensive by Georgia against South Ossetia, not a spontaneous action," says Ms. Zvigelskaya. "But the entry of Russian forces into the conflict is a worst nightmare scenario. Georgian leaders may have thought they could achieve a quick fait accompli, but now we are looking at the specter of a long conflict with much destruction and many victims."
State Department spokesman Gonzago Gallegos said Friday that Washington has sent its own representative to the region to press for an immediate cease-fire in the fast-escalating conflict. "We call on all sides, including Georgians, South Ossetians, and Russians, to bring tensions down to avoid [bringing about] a conflict," he said.
Russia has accused Georgia of breaking nonviolence agreements made after South Ossetia won its war of independence against Georgia in 1992. President Dmitri Medvedev said, he was appalled by the reported deaths of 10 Russian peacekeeping soldiers and scores of South Ossetian civilians -- about 90 percent of whom hold Russian passports -- in the course of the day's fighting. "It is my duty as president of the Russian Federation to protect the lives and dignity of Russian citizens, wherever they may be," Mr. Medvedev said.
But these accusations are but the pretexts that have provided Russia with the opportunity to tame Georgia's ambitions and thereby make it clear to the West how sensitive is the Black sea region is to its strategic interests.
Reasons behind Russian invasion of Georgia
Syed Fattahul Alim | Published: August 16, 2008 00:00:00 | Updated: February 01, 2018 00:00:00
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