In hindsight, it was after the Bucharest summit that the preparations for a military confrontation began in earnest. President Mikheil Saakashvili had already warned that this would happen. “If we don’t get [the MAP],” he said, “that’s exactly when they [the Russians] are going to start all kinds of troubles.”[27] He was proved to be right. The NATO summit affirmed that Georgia and Ukraine would, one day, “become members of NATO.” “But because the summit did not provide for a mechanism to achieve this purpose, explicitly rejecting the Membership Action Plans that would fulfill this function,” wrote David J. Smith, “Putin read NATO’s fudge for what it was. In other words, the West will continue its dalliance without seriousness of purpose.”[28] “NATO’s failure to approve a Georgian MAP at the April 2008 summit,” wrote Vladimir Socor, “emboldened Russia to escalate military operations against Georgia.”[29] The lifting of the sanctions against the breakaway regions was followed by a decree by President Putin in April 2008 instructing the Russian government to cooperate with the de facto authorities in Abkhazia and South Ossetia and to recognize some documents issued by them.[30] It was the first official step made by Russia to recognize the two breakaway entities. The new relationship, established by Russia with these provinces after April 2008, “was virtually identical to that which existed between Moscow and the federal territories within Russian proper. Georgia noted that Putin’s order amounted to Russia’s full annexation of the two Georgian regions.”[31] An imminent annexation was also revealed by the presence of high-ranking Russian FSB officers in the South Ossetian “government.”[32]
The Russian political analyst Alexander Golts wrote: “Tbilisi had every reason to
consider what had happened as a preparation for annexation.”[33] One of the consequences of the lifting of the sanctions was that it legalized the
theft by Russians of Georgian property: “Russians have been investing, especially
in real estate along the coast, though much of this property belonged, before the
1990s war, to Georgians who have not been able to return and for whom no compensation
mechanism exists.”[34] Mart Laar, former prime minister of Estonia, wrote an alarming article in the
Nobody, however, listened. US President George W. Bush, in the last year of his presidency
and extremely unpopular, was a lame duck, and the leading European states let economic
interests prevail over uncomfortable principles. During the same period the Kremlin
strengthened the self-declared “governments” of the breakaway provinces by bringing
in more of its own people. An important appointment was that of the Russian General
Vasily Lunev, a former deputy commander-in-chief of the Siberian Military District.
On March 1, 2008, he became minister of defense of South Ossetia, a region with only
sixty thousand inhabitants. In normal conditions this would have been more than a
degradation: rather an
