As diplomats wrangle over the shape of post-conflict Georgia, a mixture of harsh polemic and outright threats traded by Russia and the West has produced levels of acrimony not seen since the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Ukraine’s pro-US government announced yesterday, in a move that seemed calculated to aggravate Moscow, that it would make its missile warning systems available to western nations.
This followed Poland’s surprise declaration on Thursday that it would house US missile defence installations on its territory, prompting Anatoly Nogovitsyn, a senior Russian general, to issue a stark warning to the former Warsaw Pact country that it had become a possible target for a nuclear weapons strike.
“By hosting these [weapons], Poland is making itself a target,” said Gen Nogovitsyn, Russia’s deputy chief of general staff. “This is 100 per cent certain.”
The United States says that the missile shield, which would consist of 10 missile interceptors in Poland and a radar component stationed in the Czech Republic, is not aimed against Russia. But Russian officials have long been suspicious of western military activity in what once was the Soviet Union’s sphere of influence.
On Friday, the Russian president, Dmitry Medvedev, dismissed any notion of the American missile defence system being directed at any country but Russia.
“The deployment of new anti-missile forces in Europe has as its aim the Russian Federation,” he said. “The moment has been chosen well. And therefore any fairy tales about deterring other states, fairy tales that with the help of this system we will deter some sort of rogue states, no longer work.”
Mr Medvedev intensified the rhetoric yesterday by saying that Russian troops would remain in Georgia, the birthplace of Joseph Stalin, the former Soviet leader, for “as long as needed”.
Russia began pounding Georgia with artillery and sent thousands of troops inside Georgian territory last week after Mikheil Saakashvili, the president, ordered Georgian soldiers into its province of South Ossetia. Georgia claims South Ossetia and another breakaway province, Abkhazia, as its own, but Moscow provides both with significant political and military support.
With Russian tanks looming just 25km away during the meeting, Mr Saakashvili announced reluctantly that he had signed a ceasefire agreement brokered by France. This agreement was signed by Russia yesterday.
Mr Medvedev’s statements served as a defiant retort to the call by the US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Friday for Russia to withdraw. In language laced with Cold War undertones, Ms Rice used a meeting in the Georgian capital, Tbilisi, to liken Moscow’s military presence in Georgia to the Soviet Union’s heavy-handed forays into neighbouring countries.
“Russia needs to leave Georgia. This is no longer 1968, and the invasion of Czechoslovakia, when a great power invaded a small neighbour and overthrew its government,” Ms Rice said, referring to the crushing by Soviet and Warsaw Pact forces of a reformist movement in Czechoslovakia.
Since the breakup of the Soviet Union, Georgia had distanced itself from Russian influence. It sought to make the break complete in 2003 with the peaceful Rose Revolution that brought to power Mr Saakashvili, a US-trained lawyer.
In western capitals, efforts are mounting to find ways to punish Russia for its intervention. There has been talk of expelling Moscow from the G8, the informal grouping of major industrialised countries, and denying it membership to the World Trade Organisation. The US Congress is reported to be proposing a resolution to strip Russia of the 2014 Winter Olympic Games, to be held in Sochi.
Speaking on holiday at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, President George W Bush warned Russia that it risked becoming an international pariah despite efforts over the past decade to integrate the former communist country into the capitalist institutions of the West.
“In recent years, Russia has sought to integrate into the diplomatic, political, economic and security structures of the West,” Mr Bush said. “The United States has supported those efforts. Now Russia has put its aspirations at risk by taking actions in Georgia that are inconsistent with the principles of those institutions.”
Mr Bush said Russia’s signing of the ceasefire accord was a “hopeful step”. However, Georgia’s territorial integrity was not for debate, he said.
But while the US president is also urging leaders in the region to back Georgia, Russia’s re-emergence as an undisputed military power in Europe has produced discord among some western countries.
Lech Kaczynski, the Polish president, accused the 27-member European Union of failing to take a unified stance against Russia, which he accused of harbouring tsarist, imperialistic ambitions. “The Russians should have been told that imperial times have ended and that if Russia does not want to find itself in international isolation, it must abandon such policy and that’s that,” Mr Kaczynski said in an interview published in a Polish newspaper yesterday. “Saying that the European Union has a common policy towards Russia is a joke. Because what policy would that be? Submissiveness?”
In the two decades since the Soviet Union’s collapse, countries that formerly formed part of Russia’s backyard have steadily turned towards the West. Revolutions in Ukraine and Georgia have seen governments friendly to the United States brought to power. States formerly part of the Soviet Union as well as former Warsaw Pact countries are now formal members of Nato, while much of eastern Europe gravitates towards the EU.
Russia’s strategy has been to seek the restoration of its role as a regional and global force after a decade of economic instability and tumultuous democratic rule that left its military in tatters. Windfall oil revenues, coupled with a burst of nationalist pride generated by the former president, Vladimir Putin, a former KGB agent, have inspired renewed confidence.
Under Mr Putin’s direction, Russia has taken an assertive stance against what it sees as an encroaching West. Last year, Mr Putin resumed regular patrols of Russia’s ageing fleet of long-range strategic bombers, which had essentially lain dormant since the collapse of the Soviet Union. These sorties have alarmed the US and its allied on several occasions, leading more than once to jet fighters being scrambled in response to the flights.
Echoes of the Cold War were also heard last month when a Russian military official was quoted as saying Russia had been considering stationing long-range, nuclear-armed bombers in Cuba, the island that was host to one of the era’s most intense standoffs between the United States and the Soviet Union.
The National