Strongman, The

minutes, came back and was pleasantly surprised: ‘It said Georgia and Ukraine will become members of NATO, and I thought, this is a pretty good deal, and I went to the president and said, “Take it!” ’
    When the whirlwind passed, and the document was adopted, Gordon Brown leaned over to George Bush and joked: ‘I’m not sure what we’ve just done. I know we didn’t give them MAP, but I’m not sure we didn’t just make them members!’
    It was a compromise whose consequences would only sink in later. Bush and the East Europeans were happy because it promised Ukraine and Georgia membership of NATO; Merkel was happy because it left it entirely open-ended as to when that might happen; Georgia and Ukraine were generally pleased, but unhappy to have their membership plans kicked into the long grass; and Russia was furious.
    Watching these events unfold, I found myself wondering: would it not have been better if NATO had taken Putin’s early innocent-sounding inquiries about joining NATO more seriously? Would it not make more sense for the allies to be taking decisions together with Russia – and Georgia and Ukraine – rather than cobbling together compromises explicitly designed to take Russia’s views into account while pretending they did not?
    The roots of the problem
    In the summer of 1991 I had spent several weeks in Georgia, and witnessed the first ethnic convulsions in Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Georgia had just declared itself independent of the Soviet Union, under an earlier nationalist leader, Zviad Gamsakhurdia. Like Mikheil Saakashvili some 13 years later, Gamsakhurdia moved to restrict the autonomy of the two territories, both of which wanted to remain within the Soviet Union. It provoked a savage backlash.
    Abkhazia’s Black Sea beaches were once renowned as the Soviet ‘Riviera’, but now they were almost deserted, as Russians stayed away. The capital Sukhumi seemed to be braced for violence, and it soon came. The civil war of 1992–93 led to a mass exodus of a quarter of a million Georgians (almost half of Abkhazia’s population), leaving the 93,000 Abkhaz, who had accounted for just 18 per cent of the population, as the main group in their nominal national territory. The region now had de facto independence, supervised by Russian peacekeepers and United Nations monitors.
    In tiny South Ossetia, where Ossetians accounted for two-thirds of the almost 100,000 population, civil war had already begun. The Ossetians had tried to declare independence, and Gamsakhurdia sent in Georgia’s National Guard to restore order. It was my first experience of war. I remember the road leading into the capital, Tskhinvali, empty and blocked at either end by armoured vehicles and soldiers behind sandbagged barricades, as one of the bleakest places I had ever seen. Knots of Georgian refugees stood around, staring down the road to where their houses had burned down. Some were waiting for a military escort to accompany them through Ossetian territory to Georgian villages. In Tskhinvali, still full of the communist slogans already abandoned in the rest of Georgia, an Ossetian woman told me the kind of horror story that I would hear so often in other tortured parts of the former Soviet Union in later years: ‘Georgia doesn’t feed us. They just kill us. They pull out people’s fingernails, gouge their eyes out, burn their houses.’ I heard Georgians tell the same kind of hysterical stories about Ossetians. In one village I was shown a smoked-out bus in which, it was said, four Georgians had been doused with petrol and burned to death.
    In a Tskhinvali school, I saw a fresh graveyard for ‘the victims of Georgian fascist terror’. Ossetians now received all their supplies from North Ossetia, through the Roki tunnel. I wrote at the time that it was ‘hard to imagine how the two communities could ever again live at peace’. 9
    For the next 17 years, Abkhazia and South Ossetia lived as separate entities, with tense and tenuous ties to Georgia, and a growing reliance on Russia. Under Putin their stateless citizens received Russian passports. Like Abkhazia, South Ossetia was patrolled by a Russian-led peacekeeping force. OSCE monitors tried to keep the lid on trouble.
    Logically, Putin and Saakashvili should have been on the same side over these ‘frozen conflicts’. Russia supported the regional governments, but had resisted their calls for recognition for many years, and Putin was not at all keen to