Ten years ago this week Russian troops invaded the northern Georgia separatist region of South Ossetia, touching off a conflict that simmers today.
The Russians’ mission was ostensibly peacekeeping: The Georgian Army had moved in and taken over Tskhinvali, the de facto capital of South Ossetia, after pro-Russian separatists had begun to shell Georgian villages. Using Georgia’s “aggression” as a pretext, Russian troops rolled in, pushing past the boundaries of South Ossetia into sovereign Georgian territory, temporarily occupying several cities until several days after a cease-fire was declared on Aug. 12, 2008.
The 2008 conflict was the first time Russia’s Army had been used as an invading force on an independent country since the Soviet Union fell nearly two decades earlier. In hindsight, the action appears to have been the first step by a more aggressive Russian state, preceding its invasion of Crimea by six years. Russia’s Georgian invasion similarly marked the first time cyber warfare had been waged concurrent to military action, a precursor to Russia’s increasingly audacious interference in foreign elections — most notably, the U.S. presidential election in 2016.
Russian troops continue to occupy parts of South Ossetia and the contested territory of Abkhazia in northwestern Georgia — Russia has recognized the independence of both regions — in violation of the 2008 cease-fire. Russian troops are literally pushing the boundaries, moving fences and digging ditches, often in the dead of night. The Heritage Foundation has identified at least 56 instances of “borderization” — moving South Ossetia’s border further into Georgian territory — since 2011.
In a recent interview with U.S. News, Kimberly Joy Marten, the chairperson of the political science department at Barnard College and the director of the Program on U.S.-Russia Relations at Columbia University’s Harriman Institute, discusses President Vladimir Putin’s strategy to restore Russia’s heavyweight status. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What is Russia up to?
It is very hard to know exactly what is going on in Russia because there has been so much change over time. It hasn’t been a constant. If you remember back to early on in Putin’s presidency, he was much, much more cooperative with the West. A large part of it is that he has the goal of wanting to make Russia be great again and he wants to go down in history as the man who did that. He has chosen to define that in terms of military and security issues, and so at a time when the Russian economy is not doing all that well, it’s pretty stagnant, what he can look at of as his success is in increasing Russia’s influence abroad, and Russia’s ability to have an effect on foreign countries.
What advantage does Russia seek in cyber meddling in elections in the U.S. and in Europe?
They like the idea of causing trouble. That’s what the current military strategy of Russia really is all about. It’s the recognition that you don’t have the military capability to defeat the United States or any of its allies in any kind of military battle. But what you can do instead is just try to undermine them from within. It’s also a very classic strategy that dates back to the Cold War and the way that the KGB operated. It’s not surprising that this is something that Putin would find attractive, because he came out of the KGB and that was his whole mindset early on in his career.
The whole point of cyber is that it’s relatively cheap and Russia, dating back to Soviet history, has had outstanding software engineers. It’s just something that’s a real strength going back generations. And it’s also inexpensive, because in order to get that kind of cyber meddling that just involves getting people to do stupid things on their email, that opens up the opportunity for hacking. All you have to do is pay the salaries of the people who are engaged in the brain work behind it. The kind of stuff that Russia is doing, you just need people who are unsophisticated enough to respond to an email or to have a security program that isn’t strong enough to prevent somebody from getting in, and then it’s pretty easy and straightforward for somebody to who has the skills to take advantage of it.
What lessons did Russia take from the response to its invasion of Crimea in 2014?
Putin is very opportunistic, so if he sees the chance to do something without getting too much pushback, then he’ll continue to do it. A lot of people have made the argument that he takes Lenin’s maxim very seriously, which is that when you use your bayonets, push it in, and you find mush, keep on going and if you find steel then you should stop. That was when the sanctions started, and the sanctions have stayed in place much longer than anybody, including me, would have ever predicted. It’s been kind of amazing that the U.S. and Europe have maintained their unity on the sanctions for all of this time. It’s more than four years now that they’ve been in place. It’s not that they got no pushback whatsoever, but it is the case that they didn’t get war as a result, so that may have given Putin some confidence going forward in eastern Ukraine, as well.
What is Russia’s strategic objective in literally pushing the boundaries in South Ossetia?
It’s really hard to know what the ultimate goal is. Putin doesn’t really have ultimate goals. He is a tactical thinker and an opportunist, and that means that if he sees an opportunity, he’ll just see what works. I wouldn’t make the assumption that the little border movements that are happening in South Ossetia mean that he has any goal of taking over [the Georgian capital] Tbilisi. I think he knows very well that that would be a nonstarter, in that he’d get in big trouble and find himself in the fight of his life if he tried to do that. But certainly, if he can get a little bit around the edges and also provoke people by doing it and have the Georgians realize that, yeah, I’m in your backyard and I’m not going anywhere, that is part of what he’s all about.
I wouldn’t take it as a sign that he’s going to launch a war with Georgia. Testing the waters is fine but there’s a jump that’s sometimes involved in that logic that I don’t think Putin is stupid enough to take. The best evidence is that he stopped in eastern Ukraine. He knew full well that if he kept going forward, he was going to hit real resistance from the Ukrainians, because he would be fighting against people who would want a real insurgency campaign against what the Russians were doing. Georgia does not want Russia to take over their country and they would fight tooth and nail and he knows that very well.
What do you make of Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev’s recent comments on Georgia’s desire to join NATO?
I don’t think it’s very likely that Georgia will be invited to join NATO anytime soon. Admission is not just about protecting countries from Russia, it’s about how NATO benefits from having that country as a member. The countries that join NATO have to have the economic capability to contribute to NATO defense, because it’s all for one and one for all, which means that they’re expected to contribute to other people’s defense , too, which President [Donald] Trump has made very clear.
They are also expected to resolve all of the expected conflicts on their territory so that they do not draw NATO into a war. The whole reason that Putin is believed to have gone into South Ossetia and Abkhazia and the whole reason that Putin is keeping things at a low boil in eastern Ukraine is to make sure that those countries don’t have a definitive territorial boundary, and that means that they would never make NATO membership criteria. It’s a little bit of whistling past the graveyard for Medvedev to make that comment, because there’s not a very good chance of Georgia being invited into NATO anytime soon.
Did NATO err in not admitting Ukraine and Georgia a decade ago?
It goes the other way: It was probably an error for NATO to make that statement that Georgia and Ukraine will be NATO members at some point in the future, because that was just extraordinarily provocative. What they really meant was, “ill be NATO members in 20 or 30 or 40 years. ” It was said, basically, for the sake of domestic constituencies in NATO countries who are in the diaspora who wanted to hear that. But it was very provocative and it gave Putin an easy excuse for what he then proceeded to do, because you now have people like [political scientist] John Mearsheimer trying to make the argument that Putin went into Georgia because he was afraid of Georgia becoming a NATO member and he went into Crimea because he was afraid of Ukraine becoming a NATO member. There was no chance of that happening anytime soon, but it does give Putin an excuse for legitimacy for what he did.
There is a real sense of nervousness in the Baltic States — Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia — about what Russia is up to. Should they be worried?
It’s smart to be concerned, but not to be over-worried. Lithuania would be very difficult for Russia to do anything in, because there’s such a teeny, teeny, tiny Russian ethnic population there. They wouldn’t really have anything to hold onto.
Latvia, obviously, and also Estonia, you’ve got a relatively significant Russian ethnic minority, and the primary concern is that they could do something with little green men that would involve provoking a riot and make it seem it was coming from the domestic Russian population, and then have the domestic Russian population say they ” wanted ” Russia to come in as a peacekeeper to protect them from the terrible people at the top. Maybe locally, they’re not thinking quite this way, but I would say most Western analysts have come to the conclusions that that’s not very likely to happen, because in fact the Russian ethnic populations in both Latvia and Estonia are very much integrated into the Western trading community and don’t have any desire to go back to Russia. If they did, they could easily go back to Russia, and they’re not choosing to do that.
[ MORE: Estonia’s Lessons in Cyberwarfare]
Putin enjoys being unpredictable, and so there’s always a chance that he would do something along that line. But the fact that there’s been so much attention to that possibility, makes it much less likely that he will do it because he knows that he would get an answer. In spite of all of the talk that Trump has about not being clear about whether the U.S. would go to the defense of NATO, what we’ve actually seen is that U.S. expenditures on equipment and deployment of troops to NATO have increased under Trump rather than decreasing. The fact that those countries are NATO member states means that it’s very unlikely that Putin would be foolish enough to try something there. But who knows? It’s Putin.
How should the U.S. respond?
The major thing that we can do, in a cyber defense, just means putting a lot more resources in fighting off any potential for that kind of Russian intervention, but also thinking twice about having all the systems connected together. The more access points there are that don’t all connect to each other, the harder it is for any kind of cyberattack to be devastating because you can build it right back up again when any one part of it goes down.
The major theme that I would emphasize is that Putin is a tactician, but he’s smart. He’s not likely to do anything that would actually risk warfare, but any chance that he has to do something that is provocative and destabilizing, he will try. That really is a challenge for the United States and its allies, because we’re really not used to facing opponents that approach things in that way. It means that a traditional military way of looking at things is necessary to make sure that Putin doesn’t think about launching a real military conflict somewhere, but it’s also not sufficient. We have to be more creative in thinking about how to respond to the cyber threat and how to respond to the destabilization threats that Putin poses.
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Lessons On the 10th Anniversary of Russia’s Invasion of Georgia originally appeared on usnews.com
