Russia and Georgia: Going Their Separate Ways

Author(s): Fyodor Lukyanov
Editor(s): Lili Di Puppo, Iris Kempe, Heiko Pleines, Matthias Neumann, Robert Orttung, Jeronim Perovic
Series: Caucasus Analytical Digest (CAD)
Issue: 41
Pages: 4-7
Publisher(s): Center for Security Studies (CSS), ETH Zurich; Research Centre for East European Studies, University of Bremen; Institute for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies, George Washington University
Publication Year: 2012

For Russia, the 2008 five-day war was not about Georgia, but relations with the West. The war marked a turning point for Russia in which it has begun to build an identity based on the future rather than rooted in the past. Now that Russia has been admitted to the World Trade Organization, there is little in concrete terms that it wants from Georgia, whose leader is following the typical post-Soviet path into authoritarianism, although with a state that is more effective than Russia's.

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