What colour for Chisinau?

Tbilisi: As I write this, students have just been evicted from the parliament building in the former Soviet republic of Moldova, a day after storming it to show their despair at the idea of four more years of Communist rule there.

I’ve seen a few such popular revolts in my time (Georgia, Ukraine, Lebanon), and happen to have spent last week hopping through the post-revolutionary capitals of Kiev and Tbilisi on vacation.

The simple conclusion: these uprisings, even when they’re successful, rarely mark a wholesale change from the past.

In Ukraine, tents still occupy part of the Maidan (otherwise known as Independence Square), just as they have almost continuously since the Orange Revolution in late 2004. But the politicians the world fell in love with back then – the brave Viktor Yushchenko, with his face bearing the scars of a poisoning attack, and the glamorous Yulia Tymoshenko, with her golden Princess Leia-like braids – quickly turned on each other after the people put them in power, and politics quickly returned to the dirty old status quo in Kiev.

What looked like a popular revolution back then (albeit one with plenty of outside support) turned out to be more about one clan of oligarchs ousting the other.

My closest Ukrainian friends, who five years ago were heavily politicized and energized by what had happened on the streets of Kiev, were disheartened and interested in talking about anything but Ukrainian politics when we had dinner last week. On the Maidan, you can still buy KGB T-shirts and Lenin paraphernalia, but not one vendor bothers to sell anything orange anymore. There’s just no interest, not even from tourists.

Other than a single column in front of the main post office – which has been encased in plexiglass to protect the revolutionary graffiti painted there five years ago – it’s as if the Orange Revolution never happened.

Georgia, despite last year’s disheartening war with Russia, provides more reason for optimism. Tbilisi in 2009 is a completely different place than the city I first visited back in the fall of 2002.

Collapsing buildings in the historic Old Town have been replaced by sidewalk cafés and jazz bars. The old Intourist hotel – which for more than a decade had been overflowing with refugees from the early 1990s war in Abkhazia – is now an almost-complete five-star Radisson. (The refugees were given compensation to move elsewhere in town.)

But, like Moldova, the country is held back because large chunks of Georgian territory are de facto Russian protectorates. Last summer’s war over South Ossetia proved a disastrous miscalculation by President Mikhail Saakashvili (that's him looking alternately frazzled and amorous in the posters I saw in downtown Tbilisi), and now tens of thousands of Georgians are back on the streets demanding that he step down, just as he forced Eduard Shevardnadze aside back in 2003. (Check out reporting from the scene by my longtime friend Michael Mainville of Dowling, Ont. – now the Caucasus bureau chief for Agence France-Presse.)

Neither the Rose Revolution in Georgia nor the Orange Revolution in Ukraine brought the people on the streets the change they were seeking. The change in governments only began a whole new cycle of instability and overt Russian intervention in both countries.

That’s something the angry students in Chisinau should probably keep in mind.

Misha's terrible gamble

I know Mikhail Saakashvili a little bit. I've met him a few times in Tbilisi, and have come to admire his raw idealism (rare in politicians these days) as well as his daring and determination. Those qualities made him the perfect leader five years ago when he led from the front as street protests against a flawed election turned into the Rose Revolution that propelled him to power. Then, in his first 12 months as president, he bowled over the naysayers by tackling endemic corruption in the police and public service and bringing the renegade province of Adjaria back under Tbilisi's control.

On subsequent visits, I couldn't help but be impressed. Life in Georgia was demonstrably better after the Rose Revolution than it had been beforehand. Saakashvili had his detractors, but even they couldn't deny that he was transforming the country and the region. The West (and Western investors) loved him, and Georgia's successes inspired copycat uprisings in Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan.

But Misha's idealism and daring always had a dangerous side. His early victories led him to believe that it was only a matter of time before Georgia's other breakaway regions, Abkhazia and South Ossetia, would also succumb to Mishamania. Ignoring the one thing he could never change about his country - the fact that Russia, no matter how hard he pushed it away and tried to resist its influence, would always be Georgia's giant neighbour and most important trading partner - he insisted on flicking the Russian bear in the nose, almost to see how far and how long he could get away with it. His neocon allies in the United States (notably including Senator John McCain) cheered him every step of the way in his fight against what they saw as renewed Russian imperialism.

Misha spited the Kremlin until Russia blocked imports of Georgian wines and the country's famous Borjomi mineral water, two of the tiny country's most lucrative exports. A Canadian leader who instigated such a trade war against our giant and powerful neighbour to the south wouldn't last through the next elections, but Misha did, though only after shedding his democrat's cloak to oversee a violent crackdown on opposition demonstrators in Tbilisi last fall.

His effort to get Georgia (along with Ukraine) into NATO was also foolhardy. He must have (or at least should have) known that the bid would fail since countries like Germany and France had signalled long beforehand that they weren't interested in admitting a country that had an outstanding territorial dispute with Russia. The only thing the bid accomplished was to further convince Moscow that Saakashvili was an enemy.

Misha's twin obsessions - battling Moscow and reestablishing control over Abkhazia ad South Ossetia - were bound to cause trouble at some point. But even those who know Saakashvili couldn't have predicted that he'd take it as far as to launch Friday's surprise attack on South Ossetia.

Even for a man of his well-chronicled volatility, it was an amazing gamble. And a very poorly thought out one. Hundreds of people are now dead, most of them civilians. Russian planes are striking all over Georgia and its troops and tanks have crossed from South Ossetia and Abkhazia into Georgia proper. The Kremlin has made it clear that its end goal, one way or another, is to oust Saakashvili from power.

I'm not writing all this to defend Russia's actions. The idea of Russian troops in Gori - or Tbilisi - is abhorrent to me. But I can't for the life of me figure out what Misha (that's him in the photo, second from the right, taking cover during a Russian air raid on Gori) was thinking.

He must have known that attacking South Ossetia would provoke a massive, and disproportionate, Russian response. He should have realized that his government might not survive such a confrontation. And anyone who occasionally glances at the news could discern that his friends in America are far too concerned with places like Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan to even consider aiding him militarily against the Russian army.

The West can kick and scream and call Vladimir Putin a monster, but there's little Washington and Brussels can do. Post-Iraq, the moral high ground has been ceded and there's no longer the necessary force to back it up anyway. And Saakashvili muddied the waters for many by launching the Friday assault on South Ossetia that left 10 Russian "peacekeepers" dead. One also wonders how Washington would react if Serbian troops launched a snap assault on Kosovo (another breakaway province under foreign protection that claims independence), killing 10 NATO troops in the process.

So why did Misha do it? Why were pride and South Ossetia worth risking his government and his country's sovereignty - not to mention the hundreds of people dead - for?

As day breaks in Tbilisi on the fifth day of this unnecessary war, I know I'm not the only one asking.

P.S. - For those of you in Canada, I'll be discussing all this tomorrow morning at 7 a.m. EST on Canada AM. I'll do it again on CTV Newsnet at 7 p.m.

Russia's high-stakes bet in Georgia

Russia's decision yesterday to establish thicker ties with Georgia's breakaway regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia was as predictable as it is inflammatory.

As Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili rightly protests, the Russian foreign ministry's declaration (Civil Georgia has provided a full text of it here) that it will recognize as legal all documents issued by the separatist governments is a step towards the de facto annexation of those two territories to Russia.

According to the Russian foreign ministry statement, President Vladimir Putin has ordered his government to "interact with the actual bodies of power" in both places, and to build trade links with the regions.

This is hardly a surprising move. For years, the Kremlin has been granting Russian passports and citizenships to residents of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, even those international law clearly recognizes both provinces as parts of Georgia. Russian citizens now make up a majority of the population in both places.

The Kremlin clearly foresaw a day when its hold over the two territories would be useful in a standoff with Tbilisi, the West or both.

Throughout the Kosovo crisis, Russia warned that if the West recognized Kosovo's unilateral declaration of independence from Serbia, a strong Russian ally, it would re-evaluate its relationships with not only Abkhazia and South Ossetia, but perhaps the Transdniestr region of Moldova and the Srpska Respublika in Bosnia-Hercegovina as well. (The Kosovo example has also contributed to rising tensions between Georgia's neighbours, Armenia and Azerbaijan, over the disputed enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh)

When the West (seemingly because it couldn't figure out what else to do with Kosovo) through its weight behind Pristina's UDI, the Kremlin had two choices: accept its dimished stature and do nothing - as Boris Yeltsin did while NATO bombed Belgrade in 1999 - or do something bold to make it clear that Russia's interests can no longer be ignored as they were a decade ago. For better and for worse, Putin has spent eight years choosing the latter route.

To Saakashvili's consolation, the U.S., the EU and NATO are tripping over themselves today to denounce Russia for "openly siding with separatists" and to call on the Kremlin to respect Georgia's sovereignty. Intentionally or not, their words and arguments are borrowed from Russia's reaction to the West's support for Kosovo.

The unanswered question is how far does Western support for Georgia's territorial integrity go? How would NATO - an organization that just promised Georgia future membership - react if Russia annexed two chunks of Georgian soil, or backed their independence?

The status quo in Eastern Europe is starting to slide away, just as it did in the early 1990s, when borders regularly fell away and new states were created seemingly every month. Back then, there was only one player at the table dictating the rules.

Yesterday, dangerously, the Kremlin anted up and declared that Russia back in the game. Mikhail Saakashvili is betting hard that it's a bluff.

The New Cold War on the road: if any readers are in London or Almaty next week, please feel free to come, say hello and argue with me. On Monday I'm giving a talk at the Cafe Diplo at The Gallery in Farringdon.

Friday, I'm in Kazakhstan to take part in the opening session of the Eurasian Media Forum alongside Zbigniew Brzezinski, Gleb Pavlovsky and others. The theme is Cold War deja-vu.

A crucial summit in Romania

Leaders of the 26 members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization have just arrived in Bucharest, for what may prove to be one of most important summit meetings the alliance has held since the end of the Cold War.

What the debate should be focused on is NATO's ongoing mission in Afghanistan, which currently lacks the men and equipment it needs to succeed. Canada - which has 2,500 soldiers deployed in the volatile, Taliban-friendly Kandahar region - has borne a disproportionate share of the fighting and the casualties thus far, and has threatened to withdraw its forces unless other alliance members step up and contribute an extra 1,000 troops, as well as additional drones and helicopters.

So far, no member nation has stepped up and offered the needed forces, raising the possibility that the NATO alliance may be sliding towards ignominious defeat in the Afghan mountains, just as the Soviet Union did 20 years ago.

But as crucial as the Afghan debate is to the alliance's future, the war against the Taliban is not even the top item on NATO's agenda. Instead, the wobbling alliance is debating the merits of taking on Ukraine and Georgia as new members. (U.S. President George W. Bush continues to praise the idea, while France and Germany have wisely made their opposition plain.)

Adding the two ex-Soviet states to NATO is dangerous for many reasons. First and foremost is the possibility that it could put the alliance on a military collision course with Russia over the future of two breakaway regions of Georgia, Abkhazia and South Ossetia.

As I've written before, the West's poorly examined decision to back independence for Kosovo has heartened the Moscow-backed separatists in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, pushing them closer to their own unilateral declarations of independence. If the Abkhaz and the South Ossetians choose to follow Kosovo's path, look for Russia (and Serbia) to quickly support them and for Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili to threaten military measures to keep his country together.

If that happens today (which it could), the crisis could be defused by international mediation, even if a few shots are fired. But if a fragmented Georgia is made a NATO member before Abkhazia and South Ossetia are brought back into the fold, any standoff between Tbilisi and the separatists suddenly becomes a crisis between Moscow and the West that could have serious implications.

Former British defense secretary Malcolm Rifkind put it succinctly in an opinion piece published in today's London Telegraph:

If Ukraine or Georgia become full members, Britain and other members could find themselves required to contemplate war or other forms of military intervention if either of these countries faced armed attack.

This cannot be considered a hypothetical concern. For some years, Georgia has been unable to enjoy full territorial integrity because of the de facto secession of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Both secessionist regions enjoy strong Russian support and there have already been clashes between Georgian troops and those of the two breakaway regions.

Would it really be wise for Nato member states to accept a legal obligation, not just an option, to come to the aid of Georgia if either or both of these secessionist regimes, with or without the support of Moscow, continued to use armed force against the Georgian government?

There are similar reasons to tell Ukraine that now is not the time for it to join NATO either. Not only is the Kremlin even more heatedly opposed to seeing Ukraine join NATO than it is Georgia (President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly raised the possibility of targeting its neighbour with nuclear weapons if Kyiv joins), most Ukrainians are themselves either opposed or indifferent to the alliance, raising the possibility of further internal strife if President Viktor Yushchenko pushes ahead without public opinion fully on his side.

And, it has to be said again that NATO's relentless eastward expansion (Croatia, Albania and Macedonia are expected to join this week) - while never inviting Russia to join - raises questions of what the alliance's purpose is in the 21st century.

NATO, on paper, has always a defensive coalition. Does adding a few Balkan states, Ukraine and Georgia make the other members safer against any external threat? Or does it increase the likelihood of its members being drawn into an armed conflict?

NATO's previous waves of expansion into the former Communist bloc (including the 2004acceptance of the former Soviet states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania) have nutured the Kremlin's suspicion that NATO remains an anti-Russia bloc, thus feeding the growing paranoia and surliness in Moscow. In the minds of the ex-KGB agents who now run the country, NATO's push east demands a response.

We've already seen how this goes. NATO pushes east, ignoring Russia's concerns; Russia responds by investing more money in its military, testing new weapons systems, and doing all it can to thwart Western interests around the globe. The West's conviction that Russia is hostile necessitates Russia behaving in a hostile manner. Eventually, the damage done to the relationship between Russia and the West will become irreversible.

There's a new president on the way to the Kremlin, and while I hold little hope that Dmitriy Medvedev will be anything more than Putin's loyal second-in-command, I also once believed that Yeltsin would control Putin. Until we see what Medvedev's Russia looks like, perhaps this is a time to put the escalations on hold.

So here's a vote against expanding the Old Cold War alliance in hopes of calming the new one. NATO has other things to worry about right now. So do Ukraine and Georgia.

P.S. The New Cold War has just been published in Turkey and Estonia. That's the Turkish cover top left. Can't say I'm a fan, but maybe orange is the new black in Istanbul.

The Kosovo conundrum

It sounds increasingly like Kosovo is going to unilaterally declare independence from Serbia tomorrow.

Whatever you think of the arguments for and against Kosovo becoming an independent state, it's a dangerous step that could provoke fresh violence not only in the Serbian areas of Kosovo (if Serbia is divisible, why isn't Kosovo?), but in ethnically divided Bosnia-Herzegovina as well. Leaders of the "Respublika Srpska" could be forgiven for wondering why - if Kosovo is allowed by the international community to go its own way - they can't also declare independence or push again for union with Serbia.

Russia's foreign ministry once more earned itself the enmity of Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili last week when it linked the fate of Kosovo with Abkhazia and South Ossetia, Georgia's two breakaway regions. But the Russian stance has some merit: Why are the Kosovars more worthy of independence than the Abkhaz or the South Ossetians?

(It's worth noting here that many Georgians see the logic in what the Kremlin is saying: "Today there is no bigger problem for Georgia than possible recognition of Kosovo," Kakha Dzagania of the opposition Labor Party was quoted as saying yesterday. "That may become a precedent for recognition of Abkhazia and South Ossetia.")

There are those who will argue that the Abkhaz and South Ossetian separatism movements are not genuine, that they are manufactured by the Kremlin as a way of maintaining influence over its former colony. While there's certainly some truth to this, you could say the same about Kosovo, which has been nurtured and protected by NATO since 1999.

My point here is not to argue for or against independence for Kosovo. But I do find myself wondering how the United States and the European Union find it reasonable to argue that the Kosovars deserve the right to determine their own fate, Serbia be damned, but other peoples of Eastern Europe in similar situations do not.

If Kosovo's unilateral declaration of independence is going to get the support of the international community, let's make the right of national self-determination the new global standard. Let's set about determining the real will of the Abkhaz and the South Ossetians and back open and fair (not Russian-sponsored) referendums on whether they want to remain in Georgia. Then let's help them enforce the results.

Hell, while we're at it, let's do the same for the Transdniestr, the Respublika Srpska , Chechnya and the Crimea. If we're going to open this Pandora's Box in Eastern Europe, let's open it all the way.

Anything less looks like the West is picking favourites to suit its geopolitical agenda. And that's just begging for trouble.

S Novom Godom!

Я желаю Вам хорошее здоровье, удачу и успех в новый год!

Now back to business. I went silent for a little while. Very, very silent. Largely because my day job has been all-consuming of late, what with President Bush's tire-spinning visit to my current home, the Middle East.

That said, I'm off to Baku tomorrow for a weekend of pure relaxation by the Caspian Sea. The thought of returning to even the edge of the old USSR has me thinking:

Candidate Kasyanov - He's got the two million signatures. Does the Kremlin have the courage - and the barest commitment to democracy - to let him run against their man, Dmitriy Medvedev? Or are we going to see another "falsified signatures" charge in the coming days that will again prove that Russia is not inching towards democracy, but sliding back towards authoritarianism.

While we're at it, will Yavlinsky, Nemtsov and co. have the good sense to put their egos aside and back the only man with a hope of giving the Kremlin machine a run for its oil money?

Oleg Kozlovsky - His story is a warning, not only about fading freedom of speech in Russia, but about the biggest peril that many talented young Russians face - the draft. Many of my Russian friends spent most of their 20s doing anything - anything - to avoid being sucked into the dark and dangerous pit that is the Russian army. I've seen kids press-ganged off the streets of St. Petersburg while out walking with friends, and met soldiers in Chechnya whose parents didn't even know they were in the army, let alone stationed in Grozny. I'll wholeheartedly sign on to the Free Kozlovksy campaign, but add a note that there are thousands more like him, leading lower-profile lives, who also deserve our concern.

Much More Misha - Four more years of Saakashvili starts off with his government laying charges against tycoon Badri Patarkatsishvili. Patarkatsishvili's no saint, but neither are Vladimir Gusinsky, Boris Berezovsky and Mikhail Khodorkovsky. If this was Putin laying charges against another oligarch, wouldn't we all be asking questions about whether the President isn't really just trying to quash all political opposition?

British Council tomfoolery - If the Russian government thinks the British Council is a den of spies, it should produce the evidence and expel those it no longer wants in the country. Otherwise, it should sending spooks to follow Council staff around St. Petersburg. It's an embarrassing saga, and not for the British.

Kosovo: I've asked the question before: why is the West so insistent that Serbia is divisible, but not Kosovo? (And not Georgia or Moldova?)

Azerbaijan 2016 - C'mon, really? This what President Ilham Aliev wants to spend all the oil money on? An expensive, sure-to-fail Olympics bid? What about the hundreds of thousands of Azeris who live in poverty, just outside the Baku bubble?

February 5: If it was the $26.95 that was keeping you from buying The New Cold War, never fear. The paperback edition hits bookshelves Feb. 5.

Master and Margarita elections, part two

This is Behemoth, or at least an unknown artist's conception of the fast-talking, hell-raising black cat who was the hero (at least in my reading) of Mikhail Bulgakov's classic novel The Master and Margarita.

The book revolves a visit by the devil himself (in the company of his nefarious furry friend) to officially atheist Soviet Russia. Following his arrival, a Moscow that doesn't believe in the devil's existence rapidly descends into surrealist chaos, a place where Satan wows the crowd with magic shows and naked witches fly over the city.

Marat Gelman, the spin doctor who was involved in both bringing Vladimir Putin to power and making sure he stayed there, once told me that the 2003 Duma elections that marked the rise of United Russia and the 2004 presidential campaign that secured Putin's second term were, in his mind, Russia's "Master and Margarita elections."

Gelman called them that because he understood well the kind of system he had helped to create. He had been personally responsible for shaping the message on state-run television - hailing Putin and United Russia while either ignoring the oppoistion completely or portraying them as dangerous extremists - and knew the goal was never to test the public's support for what was going on.

Putin was always going to win a landslide with something close to 70 per cent support, not too much more but certainly nothing less (he ended up with 71.3 per cent). United Russia was going to emerge as the first party to completely dominate the country since the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

In the system Gelman and his colleagues would come to call "managed democracy," there would be elections every four years, but no real chance that anyone but a Kremlin-appointed candidate could win. The appearance of choice, but no one to choose between.

"After the elections, our politicians stopped being able to influence anything. There remained only one politician in the country - Putin," Gelman told me when I visited him afterwards at the art gallery he runs in Moscow's trendy Zamoskvareche neighbourhood. The elections, he said, marked "the end of politics" in post-Soviet Russia.

But shortly afterwards, even Gelman and his colleagues started to question the stability of the system they had helped to build. The Orange Revolution in neighbouring Ukraine jolted that country out of its semi-authoritarian stupor, and many were wondering whether the same thing couldn't happen in Russia itself.

The "democracy promoters" funded by the U.S. State Department began to investigate the possibility, and opposition leaders like Boris Nemtsov and Garry Kasparov began investing their hopes in the idea that the wave of pro-Western uprisings that had washed over Belgrade, Kiev and Tbilisi in recent years could eventually hit Red Square too.

But the three years since the Orange Revolution have given the Kremlin plenty of time to prepare. First we saw the rise of groups like Nashi and now Zaputina, which serve the purpose of imitating and confronting the pro-Western civil society that was so critical to mobilizing popular opinion in Serbia, Georgia and Ukraine.

More dangerously, we've seen the complete suppression of the media and nearly all dissent, as evidenced again by the heavy handed police response to this weekend's marches by The Other Russia opposition movement.

I used to argue with my friends over whether the revolutions in Georgia and Ukraine were good news for Russia's democrats. They believed in the "wave of freedom" theory, and thought Russia too would eventually be hit by it.

Perhaps. But my fear was always that the pro-American non-government organizations who helped fund and fuel those uprisings were so partisan in their behaviour (it's a "free and fair election" if Washington's candidate wins, a disturbing backslide on the country's commitment to democracy if they don't) that the response in Russia and other post-Soviet countries that were already tipping towards authoritarianism would be to tighten the screws on the things that made the "colour revolutions" possible - namely free media and civil society.

In 2003, with the exception of the Baltic States, Eduard Shevardnadze's Georgia and Leonid Kuchma's Ukraine were the freest and most open of the states that emerged from the collapse of the USSR. By using the political space that Shevardnadze and Kuchma gave to their opponents and critics to push for rapid radical upheavals, the revolution-makers scared the bejesus out of the authorities in other former Soviet republics.

The lesson people like Belarus's Alexander Lukashenko and Uzbekistan's Islam Karimov took away from the Rose and Orange revolutions was that Shevardnadze and Kuchma had spent too much time worrying about where they ranked on the Freedom House list, and it had cost them control of their countries. Better to crack down fast and hard, take the international tsk-tsking that comes with a "not free" rating from Washington, and keep your job and all the loot that comes with it.

Putin, it's now very clear, has drawn the same conclusion. Who cares what the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe election monitors have to say? They're all tools of the State Department, after all. The opposition? They're all dangerous thugs who belong in jail. The media? Some die, some live. It's really not worth investigating why that is.

So here comes another round of elections without a choice. Behemoth walks the streets of Moscow again.

Snap elections in Georgia

News agencies have been reporting in the last few minutes that President Mikhail Saakashvili has declared there will be a snap presidential election on Jan. 5.

If true, it's a wise move by President Misha. His move to crack down on protests this week and declare a state of emergency smelled of the kind of autocracy he once stood against.

It's also politically smart: the opposition so far doesn't have a single figure it can rally around, now they have less than two months to find someone. Unless Nino Burjanadze, the popular speaker of parliament and a loyal Saakashvili ally, can be convinced to run against him, Saakashvili's main contender is likely to be the controversial ex-defense minister Irakli Okruashvili, who is currently in exile in Germany, avoiding prosecution on corruption charges.

Saakashvili's decision to deploy soldiers on the streets of Tbilisi to quell the opposition protests this week shouldn't be forgotten, or forgiven, but I'd still bet that Misha comes out of this smelling, well, like roses.

Tear gas in Tbilisi

The latest out of Georgia is that riot police, acting on the orders of President Mikhail Saakashvili, have dispersed several thousand anti-government protestors using tear gas, water cannons, fists and batons.

In a televised address, Saakashvili said the protests were part of a Russian plot to create unrest in the country. He promised he had "incontrovertible evidence" of such nefariousness that he would release "soon."

We'll see.

In the interim, a few things strike me about President Misha's crackdown, most of all that it's a final break with many of the people who helped bring him to power during the Rose Revolution four years ago. In contrast, Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko - ever-conscious that it was the people who brought him to power - has tolerated all kinds of protests against his rule, some of which have blocked the centre of Kiev and left the country almost ungovernable for weeks at a time.

The people still own the streets in Ukraine, for better and for worse. That's no longer so in Georgia.

This quote, from Giga Bokeria, the head of Saakashvili's National Movement, was particularly jarring to me:

"This is absolutely normal for any Western democratic country," he told The Messenger newspaper in defense of the crackdown. Bokeria said the authorities had no choice ut to act once the protestors "made direct calls for the overthrow of the government."

This from one of the key plotters of the Rose Revolution, a man who helped plan the occupation of the centre of Tbilisi for three weeks in 2003. Back then, it was he who was calling for the overthrow of the government, so I guess it was OK.

More obvious hypocrisy: The pro-opposition Imedi TV was also taken off the air, apparently after police raided the studios (Imedi recently ran an interview from the exiled opposition figure Irakli Okruashvili in which he vowed that Saakashvili's "days are numbered.") Not so long ago, Bokeria and Saakashvili were among the crowd in the street, decrying the previous government for briefly shutting down the Rustavi-2 channel that was to Saakashvili's uprising what Imedi is today's protestors.

Regardless of the allegations of Russian involvement (and we must remember here that Saakashvili came to power with plenty of American help), Saakashvili is showing that he can and will crack down where Eduard Shevardnadze did not.

While researching my book, I interviewed Saakashvili and many others who helped plan and carry out the Rose Revolution. They all told me that one of the reasons they had the courage to remain in the streets for three chilly weeks back in 2003 was their conviction that Shevardnadze was not a complete autocrat. Unlike, say, Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus or Islam Karimov of Uzbekistan, they believed that the Silver Fox would not use force against his own people.

With some of his old Rose Revolution allies now arrayed against him, the tear gas and the water cannons were a message from Saakashvili to his former comrades that could be boiled down to "I know your game, I know how this works. Don't expect me to go as gently as Shevardnadze did."

And bringing down Saakashvili is exactly what the opposition now plans to do.

I'm torn about all this. I've written admiringly about the evident progress Georgia has made under Saakashvili. But it all risks coming undone if he starts behaving like just another post-Soviet autocrat.

It saddened me to see the scenes on Rustavelis Gamziri today.

A shout-out to a fellow blogger: Matthew Collin of This is Tbilisi Calling fame is filing great reports from the scene for BBC World.

The crisis this time

Poor Georgia. The country, perhaps more than any other former Soviet republic, has been in constant turmoil since the day the USSR dissolved. Wars, revolutions, mass protests - these things are as Georgian as khachapurri and over-sweet red wine.

Mikhail Saakashvili's rise to power via the Rose Revolution in 2003 was supposed to bring an end to all this. And if you were watching the slick government-bought commercials that are in heavy rotation on CNN ("And the winner is: Georgia"), you might believe that he'd succeeded in finally making the tiny Caucasian state into a stable, westward-looking, ready-for-Europe country.

But here we are exactly four years after the heady days of the Rose Revolution, and the streets are again full. Saakashvili can, with some reason, call the protests Russian-inspired but that doesn't negate the fact that the centre of Tbilisi is shut down and his government is facing its most serious challenge to date. And, of course, the Rose Revolution came about with more than a little American help.

Most opinion polls show that Saakashvili's National Movement is still easily the most popular party in the country, though he certainly wouldn't win 96 per cent support, as he did four years ago, in another presidential vote. But even the president has admitted that he's done a poor job of explaining why there isn't going to be fresh elections until next fall - five years after the last round. (Georgia previously had elections every four years, meaning this should be parliamentary election time, but Saakashvili changed the constitution two years ago so that presidential and parliamentary elections would be held together from now on.)

Saakashvili's inferences during his lengthy interview with Georgian TV about not wanting the country to be in an election cycle while Russia was holding its own parliamentary and presidential votes are fascinating. So too is his open linkage of the Kosovo crisis to the separatist regions of Georgia, Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Saakashvili clearly sees an international showdown coming, and doesn't want to have to deal with it and an election at the same time.

Still, the most interesting thing for me about these protests is the leading role of figures like Tinatin Khidasheli, who were once allies of Saakashvili's and who were instrumental members of the NGO coalition that brought about the Rose Revolution four years ago.

Back then, Saakashvili was their chosen saviour who would save Georgia from chaos and corruption. Now they're pining for the golden days of poor old Eduard Shevardnadze, whom history may once more come to judge kindly.

One more thing. I urge all of you to check out Natalia Antelava's beautifully written tribute to Alisher Saipov, the Uzbek journalist who was murdered last week, likely because of the work he did writing about corruption, torture and the betrayal of the people by Uzbek President Islam Karimov's government.

She gets it exactly right. The international media relies on people like Alisher Saipov to understand the countries that we're hurriedly sent to when a crisis breaks out. Without people like him (I can't help thinking and worrying of my own Uzbek friends right now), the story doesn't get out, and the thugocrats win.

As for the whodunnit, Antelava's piece leaves little question in my mind:

[Saipov's] paper was becoming increasingly popular ahead of the December presidential election, in which Mr Karimov is seeking re-election.

And, with its popularity, Alisher's name too was gaining prominence.

He was beginning to feature heavily on Uzbek state-controlled television, portrayed as a terrorist, a dangerous man with a hidden agenda of overthrowing the Uzbek state.

The last time I saw him he told me that there were even rumours that the Uzbek government had put a price on his head.

Ra-Ra-Ras-Putin

Oh, to be in Tamarasheni today. The South Ossetian village, one of the few in the breakaway republic that is still under the Georgian government's control, is the site of a remarkable concert today by 80s disco stars Boney M (pictured).

Yep, the musical geniuses behind such hits as "Rasputin" (which while a hazy memory in the West is still a big hit across much of the former Soviet Union) have somehow found their way to a pokey village on the edge of a conflict zone.

Believe it or not, the show is part of Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili's efforts to win over the "hearts and minds" of South Ossetians. Word is that the music will be cranked up loud enough to be heard in the rebel capital, Tskhinvali.

The message, distilled: See, you silly Ossetians, life really is better over here in the rest of Georgia. So good that we have time for disco dancing. When was the last time you got your groove on? Drop all this silly separatism and we can all dance together.

My good friend Michael Mainville, the Agence France Presse correspondent in the Caucasus, filed this report to AFP from Tbilisi:

The concert is part of a wider effort to convince South Ossetian rebels that they would lead more peaceful, prosperous - and possibly funky - lives
under Georgian control.

"Our message is that we are against war, extremism and violence. We want to resolve all problems peacefully, and peaceful life resumes where people sing songs," said Dmitry Sanakoyev, the head of a rival pro-Georgian administration in South Ossetia.

Oh, and:

Violence continues to plague the area and sniper fire is common after nightfall. This summer saw some of the heaviest fighting in the region in years, with both sides accusing each other of launching mortar and grenade attacks.

Nevermind that. A little Ossetian cheese pie, a glass of Georgian red wine (preferably a Saperavi) and Boney M belting out "Daddy Cool." I can't decide if that's heaven or hell, but I wanna be there either way.

If this works, perhaps Saakashvili can convince his buddy George W. Bush to bring some other 80s stars out of retirement - Wang Chung and Level 42 jump to mind - to see if they can't cheer up those grumpy Iraqis.

Street theatre season begins

In the Soviet era, questions of power and politics were decided by a small group of men, meeting in private within the red walls of the Kremlin in Moscow. The masses in far-flung places like Tbilisi and Kiev played no role whatsoever in deciding whether Nikita Khrushchev should remain in power in 1964, or who would replace Leonid Brezhnev as their leader after his death in 1982.

These days, however, the masses rule. Or at least whoever can get the masses out on his side does.

Protests against Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili began today in Tbilisi. Duelling demonstrations by the supports of Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko and his archrival, Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovich, could begin as early as Sunday (I'll be on CTV's flagship morning program Canada AM Monday morning to talk about why).

And Russia's Duma elections this December, as well as the presidential elections coming in the spring, are expected to be marked by some of the largest protests (both for and against the current establishment) that country has seen since the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.

The Georgian protests (pictured) were sparked by a chain of events that first saw former defense minister Irakli Okruashvili make astonishing allegations that Saakashvili was not only corrupt, but had once ordered him to kill businessman Badri Patarkatsishvili. (He also suggested a government cover-up in the mysterious 2005 death of former prime minister Zurab Zhvania, saying Zhvania had died somewhere besides where his body was found.)

Two days later, on Thursday, Okruashvili was arrested and charged with extortion, money laundering, misuse of power and criminal negligence. Yesterday, his supporters took to the streets, 6,000 to 7,000 of them, according to Georgia's The Messenger newspaper.

Even without the usual Washington-versus-Moscow overtones, it would be a pretty complicated drama. But as Olga Allenova wrote in Russia's Kommersant newspaper, it's likely Moscow that encouraged Okruashvili to take on Saakashvili head-on. Whatever the truth of the back-and-forth allegations of criminality, the Kremlin has tired of Saakashvili, who came to power through the American-backed Rose Revolution in 2003, and is supporting Okruashvili's push to oust him. Post-Rose Revolution, the way to do that is to make it appear as though the streets are with your man.

A similar dynamic is playing out in Ukraine, where both the Kremlin-backed Yanukovich and the Western-friendly Yushchenko are each accusing the other side of election fraud before the first ballots are even cast.

The elections are so close that some tampering seems inevitable. "Half of Ukraine supports Orange [Yushchenko and his Orange Revolution ally Yulia Tymoshenko], and the other half Blue [Yanukovich], so a tiny additional margin added by cheating could make all the difference," Roman Koshovi, Lvov chairman of the Committee of Ukrainian Voters, an election-monitoring group, told my friend and colleague Fred Weir of the Christian Science Monitor. "The temptation to fix some ballots will be very strong on all sides," Koshovi added.

And when the cheating happens, people like Committee of Ukrainian Voters and the election monitoring team sent by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe will be there to catch them and tell the world (or at least the Western media).

Which is why Canadian politician Gerard Kennedy got in trouble with the Donetsk cops today. With the stakes so high and the race so close (polls put Yanukovich ahead, but with the "orange team" attracting roughly the same amount when Yushchenko and Tymoshenko's support is combined), international monitors are seen not as arbiters, but as potential instigators. What they say could influence how big, and how motivated, the crowds in the streets are the next day.

As an aside, Canadian monitors are also seen as highly partisan, after some of them were spotted wearing orange during the 2004 showdown.

Whoever wins in Ukraine, the other side is likely to try and reverse the result on the streets of Kiev. Both Yanukovich and Tymoshenko already have their tent cities set up.

Yanukovich's people are already camping on Independence Square, the site of the Orange Revolution three years ago. Tymoshenko's followers on Sofievsky Square, a few blocks up the hill.

Stay tuned. Just like in Georgia and Russia, the Ukrainian elections won't end when the voting does.

Another act of war

Count me among those unsurprised this morning when Georgia reported that a pair of Russian SU-24 fighter jets had entered Georgian airspace and fired a surface-to-air missile that landed near the town of Tsitelubani, outside Tbilisi. Thankfully it didn't explode - that's a picture of the crumpled dud at left.

This is at least the fourth time in six years that Russia's air force has attacked Georgian territory. Five years ago (while I was in Georgia on a reporting trip) the cause was ostensibly to root out Chechen fighters holed up in the Pankisi Gorge. These days, (there was another attack, confirmed by the United Nations, back in March) the attacks seem linked to Russia's dissatisfaction with the American-supported President Mikhail Saakashvili and a broader problem the Kremlin has accepting the influence Washington now wields over the tiny ex-Soviet republic.

In particular, Saakashvili has made no secret of his intention to bring the Russian-backed separatist regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia back under Tbilisi's control. The March attack by Russian helicopters occurred in the Kodori Gorge, a part of Abkhazia still under Tbilisi's. Yesterday's attack happened near the informal border with South Ossetia. These attacks are very clear, if very clumsy, warning signals about the position Russia will take if Saakashvili pushes too hard.

The Russian military, for the record, has denied the attack and said no Russian planes were anywhere near Tsitelubani. The South Ossetian separatist leader, meanwhile, has suggested that Georgia fired the missile at its own territory as part of a plan to discredit Russia. Given the history, I'll wait for the next UN report before I put much credibility in such the Russian air force's version of events.

In the meantime, I'm beginning to sympathize more and more with something I previously didn't agree with - Saakashvili's quest to bring Russia into NATO.

War without end

I keep hearing that the war in Chechnya is now over, and reading nice features in places like the New York Times and Newsweek about how pleasant it is to visit Grozny these days. Then you scan the news wires and get a very different image.

With a nod to La Russophobe, here's a look back at the week that was in "peaceful" Chechnya and the neighbouring republics of Dagestan and Ingushetia.

Interfax: Two policemen killed in attack in Chechnya - July 19 2007

AP: Drunken Russian soldier in Chechnya kills 1 officer and wounds 3 - July 19, 2007

Interfax: Seven wounded in blast at cemetery in Ingushetia (AP later puts number of injured at 10) - July 18 2007

Interfax: Explosion kills four policemen in Dagestan (see above pic of aftermath) - July 18 2007

Interfax: Ingush president's family residence comes under attack, no fatalities - official - July 17, 2007

AP: Woman, 2 children fatally shot in Russian region (re: Ingushetia) - July 16, 2007

And those are just the events that the newswires deemed worthy of reporting on. You can bet that there was plenty more below-the-media-radar violence that didn't make it to the desks of AP and Interfax. For what it's worth, the rebel-affiliated Kavkaz Center website says that five Russian soldiers were killed by the Chechen "mujahideen" on July 14 as well, and that 19 others were killed in fighting the previous week.

As someone who visited Chechnya more than once, I've always been extremely skeptical that Vladimir Putin's money and Ramzan Kadyrov's thuggishness could bring anything more than a facade of stability to a republic that is no more comfortable under Russian rule now than it was in the 19th Century.

While we're on the topic of instability in the Caucasus, I recommend that anyone interested check out the Institute for War and Peace Reporting's interesting three-part series on the arms buildup in the South Caucasus.

Clearly, Chechnya's neighbours don't believe peace in their time has arrived just yet either.

The wrong way to say thank you

Mikhail Saakashvili and his government owe the Bush Administration a favour. That's well known. Without the overt and covert support of the U.S. (and billionaire financier George Soros), the 2003 "Rose Revolution" probably never would have happened, and Eduard Shevardnadze would likely still be Georgia's president.

And yes, with Russia trying to economically strangle its smaller neighbour with crushing sanctions on Georgian exports of wine and mineral water, Saakashvili and co. need all the big, powerful friends they can get right now.

Still, the decision to more than double the number of Georgian troops fighting alongside the U.S. in its misguided war in Iraq boggles the mind.

On Friday, Georgia's parliament voted to increase the troop deployment from 850 to 2,000. Many of these will be deployed in and around Baghdad, very likely putting them in the line of fire.

While many of the troops are said to be willing to go because they receive nearly triple their regular pay while in Iraq (thanks to the U.S., which pays nearly two-thirds of their salaries), Saakashvili is nonetheless putting his country on the wrong side of history here.

Unlike most, if not all, of the Georgian parliamentarians, I have been to Iraq five times since 2003, and can tell you that each subsequent trip was more dangerous for me personally. Simply put, the country is disintegrating, likely into three parts.

I've also met Mr. Saakashvili twice, and if he granted me a third meeting, I'd tell him bluntly that sending an extra 1,150 Georgian soldiers to Baghdad won't stop this, and that sending them there is misguided and more than a little sycophantic.

Of the few who once shared Bush's vision of reshaping the Middle East through toppling Saddam Hussein and ridding the country of its phantom weapons of mass destruction, Britain is leaving and Italy and Spain have left.

Georgia, too, has done its time, having initially committed troops back in August 2003.

Parliamentary speaker Nino Burdzhanadze said Georgia made the decision to up the number of troops because the country "knows the price of friendship, and will never forget the support that has been provided" by America.

If sticking with Bush to the end of his foolhardy war is really the price of America's friendship, it's far too high. A real friend would tell him that.

The missing ingredient

This post is published as part of the Russian media "Blog-Carnival" hosted by my friends at Krusenstern.

Russia’s notoriously fractious opposition has finally settled on a single candidate for the 2008 elections in former prime minister Mikhail Kasyanov. As I wrote before, I think Kasyanov is the right choice – someone who can claim credit for some of the good done in terms of stabilizing the country during Vladimir Putin’s early years in office, while able to distance himself from the authoritarian slide that followed.

Kasyanov’s nomination moves the opposition one step closer to their goal – which is not the electoral victory over Sergei Ivanov or Dmitriy Medvedev (or whomever the Kremlin puts forward next spring) that Kasyanov and friends claim to be seeking. With the Kremlin in full control of the electoral machine, and known to be willing to dump a few thousand ballots in a pit in Dagestan if it comes to that, no one expects the official results of the vote to yield anything other than a convincing victory for Vladimir Putin’s hand-picked successor. (If Putin goes at all, I should add here. See poll at bottom right.)

The real aim is an Orange Revolution-style uprising on the streets of Moscow next spring, something that Kremlin strategists like Sergei Markov and opposition figures like Boris Nemtsov have told me both sides are actively preparing for.

In preparing the country for such an uprising, putting aside pride and personal ambitions to rally around a single leader like Kasyanov is crucial for the opposition. The Orange Revolution would never have happened if Viktor Yushchenko and Yulia Tymoshenko hadn’t been prodded (by the USAID-backed National Democratic Institute, among others) into ignoring the fact they agreed on little else, and focusing on their shared desire to see the end of Leonid Kuchma and Russian tutelage in Ukraine. The same goes for Mikhail Saakashvili and Zhurab Zhvania in Georgia before that, as well as Vojislav Kostunica and Zoran Djindjic in Serbia back in 2000.

This is no conspiracy theory, just the way politics works across the former Soviet Union in this new cold war between Russia and the West. Putin and his coterie see the ex-republics of the USSR as still being Russia’s sphere of influence, and invest heavily in leaders like Viktor Yanukovich and Nursultan Nazarbayev who share that worldview.

The West – predominantly America, but increasingly Europe too – recognize that Russian meddling in the internal affairs of its neighbours has corrupted the politics of those countries, giving the Kremlin an unsettling amount of control over the energy basin of Central Asia and the Caspian Sea (which worries the White House far more than, say, the lack of democracy in Western-friendly Azerbaijan). Since the success of the Western-sponsored uprising against Slobodan Milosevic seven years ago, they’ve actively been trying to export the model that worked there to other countries in the region. It worked in Ukraine and Georgia, it’s failed twice in Belarus.

What’s missing in the opposition's plan so far is an independent national broadcaster that can put the its message out across the vast Russian hinterland and rouse public anger with the authorities by letting ordinary Russians know that they’ve been deceived by the current Kremlin. B-92 in Serbia and Rustavi-2 television in Georgia (both supported by American billionaire George Soros) played key roles in popularizing the pro-Western opposition and demonizing the old authorities in those countries. Petro Porashenko’s 5th Channel rallied Ukrainians to Independence Square, and provided 24-hour coverage of the demonstrations that played a part in convincing Kuchma and Yanukovich not to disperse the crowd by force.

Russia, under Putin, has no national broadcaster that can (or is willing to) play such a role. Himself partially a creation of the oligarchs and their media empires, Putin understood early on that he could just as quickly be undone by them, and in his first years in office he systematically brought all the main television channels under direct or indirect Kremlin control. Bringing the once feisty media to heel was a key step towards establishing the system that cynically came to be known as “managed democracy”: giving people the appearance of choice, with little in fact to choose between.

Newspapers like Novaya Gazeta and the unmatched Echo of Moscow radio station continue to bravely buck the Kremlin, and thereby provide some outlet for the opposition and its message. But neither has national reach. No one in Chelyabinsk or Pskov or Perm is going to hear their coverage of Mikhail Kasyanov’s attacks on Ivanov/Medvedev, let alone reports about missing ballot boxes or the discrepancies between the official results and the Western-sponsored exit polls.

Barring a major change in the political landscape, most Russians, just as they did during the 2004 elections, will receive only a single line from the Kremlin and its media outlets - one that will be mandated through government-issued “themes”, or temnyki sent to editors across the country. The essence will be: Ivanov/Medvedev is the choice of the people. The other candidates are an unpatriotic bunch of creeps. Everything is getting better. Trust us.

Tight media control by Alexander Lukashenko’s regime in Belarus was one of the major reasons that attempted pro-Western uprisings have twice failed in Minsk (in 2001 and 2006). In Ukraine, the state’s use of temnyki turned half the population against the Orange Revolution before it even began.

But all is not yet lost for the opposition, as demonstrated by how quickly government control of the media cracked in Ukraine in 2004 after a single, extremely symbolic act of defiance by Nataliya Dmytruk, a sign-language presenter at the state-run UT-1 television station.

“The results announced by our Central Election Commission are rigged. Do not believe them,” she signed to her audience in the first days after the rigged presidential run-off between Yushchenko and Yanukovich, an orange ribbon rebelliously tied around her wrist.

Her Ukrainian-language colleagues carried on with their coverage president-elect Yanukovich, unaware of Dmytruk's one-woman uprising. “Our president is Yushchenko," she went on. "I am very disappointed by the fact I had to interpret lies. I will not do it anymore. I do not know if you will see me again.”

Within days, Dmytruk’s lone act of defiance had spread into a wider journalists’ revolt against the authorities and their temnyki. They started telling the truth to their audience and angry at the deception, thousands Ukrainians more joined the orange-waving crowds in the streets. It was a breakthrough that no amount of Western funding could have bought.

These are dark days for the Russian media. The murder of Anna Politkovskaya made clear the risks that independent minded journalists run when they try to tell the truth about their country and the people who run it. According to Reporters sans frontières, she was the 21st journalist murdered in circumstances seen as likely related to her work since Putin came to power in 2000.

The Russian opposition has its Yushchenko now in Mikhail Kasyanov. But what will determine the country’s future is whether it has enough Dmytruks and Politkovskayas to tell the country about him.

One can't help but worry that too many have been scared into silence.

The New Cold War

What a day. Spies and double agents. New ballistic missile tests. A threatening speech by the Russian President. More political turmoil in Ukraine. Gunfights in a breakaway region of Georgia. The gloves, it seems, are truly off between the Kremlin and the West.

Take today's allegations by Andrei Lugovoi that Alexander Litvinenko was a British agent who tried to recruit him, and that either the British secret service or exiled oligarch Boris Berezovsky was behind Litvinenko's murder-by-polonium. Whatever the truth of his charges, he couldn't have made them at the Interfax press centre without approval from very, very high up in the Kremlin. It tells you that relations between London and Moscow have now officially reached the abysmal stage.

The same goes for Washington. A few hours after Lugovoi finished his jaw-dropping press conference, Vladimir Putin held one of his own to announce that American actions - specifically moves to establish an anti-missile shield in Eastern Europe - had forced Russia to begin a "new round of the arms race" in order "to maintain the strategic balance in the world." Putin's remarks came two days after Russia tested a new intercontinental ballistic missile, which is capable of carrying up to 10 warheads (thereby easily overwhelming the limited defenses the U.S. wants to establish in Poland and the Czech Republic). It suddenly feels very 1980 around here.

In this context, the sudden backtracking by Kremlin ally Viktor Yanukovich in Ukraine (who is footdragging on promises to pass legislation for a fall election there), as well as the shelling of Georgian positions this week by Russian-backed separatists in South Ossetia, look like part of a broader message from Moscow.

Don't back us into a corner, the Kremlin is bearishly saying. If you do, we can cause no end of trouble.

Ukraine and Georgia in NATO?

I just read that the U.S. House of Representatives has endorsed another (eventual) expansion of NATO, this time to include Albania, Macedonia, and Croatia, as well as the ex-Soviet republics of Ukraine and Georgia.

Ukraine and Georgia are, of course, indepedent states that can join whatever international organizations they choose. But the endless eastward expasion of the trans-Atlantic alliance - while telling Russia that it is not welcome and will never be welcome to join - is what Putin was talking about in his Munich speech when he grumbled that "we have the right to ask, against whom is this expansion directed."

I don't often agree with Vladimir Vladimirovich, but in this case, he's right. Why does NATO need to add the military might of an Albania or a Georgia to its already unrivalled force? To fight "terrorists"?

Mikhail Saakashvili would point out here that Georgia has already proven itself a strong U.S. ally, and is deserving of being formally recognized as such. It's the only country still offering to send more troops into the Iraqi quagmire when Italy and Spain are long gone and Britain and Poland are leaving.

The Kremlin, however, sees it as pure, aggressive, encirclement. It can still stir up a lot of trouble in Ukraine (it's Black Sea Fleet is still parked at Sevastopol) and in Georgia, where it effectively controls the renegade provinces of Abkhazia and South Ossetia.

If NATO gets closer to formally inviting Kiev and Tbilisi to join, don't expect the Kremlin to take it lying down.