Russia’s relations with the West “plunged to their most critical point in a generation” on Tuesday, when the Kremlin “built on its military rout of Georgia” and effectively “killed off” the recently negotiated ceasefire by recognising the breakaway provinces of South Ossetia and “strategically vital” Abkhazia as independent states, said Ian Traynor in The Guardian.
Russia was quick to defend itself: the BBC was summoned to the Black Sea resort of Sochi for an interview with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, who also wrote a piece in the FT in which he said the decision was taken to save lives. The histories of the Ossetian and Abkhaz peoples, their “desire for independence, the tragic events of the past weeks and international precedents” governed the decision, he wrote. He accused Georgia of “sowing seeds of discontent” within Abkhazia and South Ossetia by inflicting a “vicious war” on its minorities, and said that Russia had repeatedly warned the West that by recognising Kosovo’s illegal declaration of independence from Serbia it had set a precedent for breakaway states such as Abkhazia and South Ossetia.
The comparison with Kosovo is “specious”, said The Globe and Mail. Kosovo was never legally part of Serbia, but was rather an autonomous component of the Yugoslav federation, which dissolved in the early 1990s. Although Georgian behaviour in Abkhazia and South Ossetia has “not always been saintly”, it does not bear comparison with the slaughter of Kosovar Albanians that preceded Nato’s 1999 intervention. Anyone who doubts the Kremlin’s true attitude towards secessionist movements should look to Chechnya, where it fought “two brutal campaigns” and “flattened” Grozny. No one expects that Abkhazia or South Ossetia will become “independent in anything but name”.
It is clear that Russia is “revelling in its newly found fearsome image”, said Bridget Kendall on the BBC. The West should take this chance to “hoist Russia’s government on its own petard”, said The Globe and Mail. If Medvedev is so concerned with the democratic destiny of Ossetians and Abkhazians, “surely he would not object to the deployment of a peacekeeping force to protect it”.