Georgia: Russian Puppet President

Registan says that while the military conflict with Russia in Georgia appears to be going Moscow’s way, things are not all as they might first appear. In particular, the blog says, the South Ossetia crisis has exposed the farce that is Russian democracy.

Some very smart people think Putin is the big winner of the war in Georgia. He is not. George W. Bush is. And not in the way you think.

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So how would Bush win from this? South Ossetia is clearly not acting on its own—as Joshua Kucera found when he visited Tskhinvali, pretty much the whole government resides in Moscow, and the rest of the country is famously closed off to journalists—he got into trouble for photographing a building simultaneously flying Russian and Ossetian flags, though he couldn’t figure out why. Kucera even noticed that the anti-Georgian rhetoric in South Ossetia was more inflammatory than in Abkhazia, which could indicate why Georgia resorted to force here and not during any of the recent escalation events in Abkhazia.

From the political side of things, contra Zenpundit, this conflict is actually showing how Medvedev loses. By moving into the conflict zone to take personal command, Putin has demonstrated how much of a figurehead Medvedev really is.

But notice how Georgia’s oil assets are being left alone. BTC, despite initial reports to the contrary, remains untouched. And there is no way Russia wants to turn Tblisi into Grozny—politically, to a limited degree Russian does care about its perception abroad, and it couldn’t withstand a global panic about Russian expansionism. Having incontrovertible proof that Medvedev is a limp puppet ruler, with Putin the actual power broken behind the scenes, means Russia loses a great deal of its political clout since it can no longer even be called an authoritarian democracy. It therefore must resort to force to achieve any of its political ends, whether it is forcing Georgia into subservience or forcing Europe into oil dependency. A wannabe tsar ruling from the prime minister’s office might sound ominous, but it speaks to Russia’s tremendous political rot, which this conflict is highlighting. And that rot means it has little prospect of lasting for a long time (the moment Putin is out of the picture, it is difficult to imagine anything other than chaos).