South Ossetia

Although politically quite similar, coming to South Ossetia from Abkhazia felt like stepping into another world: snow-capped mountains, deep valleys and, as being made to stand outside for passport checks made painfully clear, quite a bit colder. This bureaucratic purgatory was the most tedious I’ve ever encountered, totalling over six hours to get past the Russian and South Ossetian checkpoints.

With a lot of the history and dynamics explored in my previous blog, my discussion of South Ossetia will be shorter. The key thing that distinguishes it from Abkhazia is that, as its name suggests, there is also a North Ossetia, which is currently part of the Russian Federation. Having now visited that too at the time of writing, my impression is that this is a fairly arbitrary distinction today, owing to political factors rather than cultural ones – at least post the expulsion of ethnic Georgians from South Ossetia in 2008. South Ossetia definitely felt more “Russian” than Abkhazia, in so far as their brethren to the north identify as such.

A second important detail worth noting is that the republic, numbering around 50,000, is minuscule. When compared against the war in Ukraine, the relative scale here is considerably smaller and, concomitantly, the cost incurred by Russia for advancing its aims here. Approximately 10,000 troops are stationed across these two republics, which by some estimates wouldn’t even replace the casualties in Ukraine for ten days.

South Ossetia, like Abkhazia, was formally part of the Georgian SSR. Unlike Abkhazia, however, it was an autonomous oblast rather than a republic – constitutionally one rung below, but in practice much the same. It’s worth drilling down on this for a moment. After the Russian Revolution in 1917, Georgia enjoyed a brief stint of independence before being quashed during the Russian Civil War. The Georgians had asserted borders that included Abkhazia and South Ossetia, both of which revolted against their rule. When the Georgian SSR was established in 1922, Abkhazia and South Ossetia were awarded special status in recognition of their support for the Bolsheviks during the war – a Machiavellian coup that gifted Georgia its territorial integrity but included restive, and now emboldened, populations who would enable Moscow to retain leverage over the wider republic.

This booby trap went off in a similarly explosive manner to Abkhazia when the Soviet Union collapsed: South Ossetia voted to remain part of the “renewed federation” of Soviet republics in 1991, which Georgia naturally regarded as illegitimate, sparking a war that concluded the following year. An unstable peace ensued under the aegis of a joint peacekeeping force that left a de facto independent South Ossetia and a resentful Georgia that would increasingly look to settle the constitutional matter of its territories by force.

In 2004, newly-elected Georgian president Saakashvili sought to bring the country’s separatist territories to heel. He did this successfully in Adjara – whose capital Batumi readers might be familiar with – but failed to replicate his success in South Ossetia. He then tried militarily in 2008, Russia intervened, and the rest is history. The question of why he did so ultimately owes to a nationalist impulse which held that Georgia’s borders should reflect those enjoyed during its brief independence in the early twentieth century. The timing, however, owes to Russian provocations, including shooting down Georgian drones over Abkhazia and issuing Russian passports to South Ossetians en masse. Georgia took the bait, probably in part because it believed it would get backing from the West, which never materialised. It tried to frame the attack as defensive, though interestingly the EU’s subsequent fact-finding mission blamed Georgia for initiating the war, although it did criticise Russia’s response as disproportionate.

As I argued in my Abkhazia blog, there is a real danger of projecting Russia’s naked aggression in 2022 onto this conflict. Undoubtedly, Moscow’s intentions have been subversive from the Soviet outset. However, this does not in my opinion invalidate the aspirations of two peoples who have made clear they have no intention of being part of Georgia. Yes, Georgians were expelled, but from conflicts ultimately of their own government’s making, and these must be seen within the context of war, in which Abkhazians and South Ossetians were also expelled in considerable numbers. So if the moral picture is not entirely black and white, what of the strategic considerations? Being sparsely populated and dirt poor, their only strategic value is leverage over Georgia, which would evaporate the moment Georgia relinquished its claims over them. South Ossetia’s insecurity surrounding recognition is laid bare at the national museum in Tskhinvali, which houses a collection of gifts bestowed by foreign leaders. Suffice to say these countries probably wouldn’t be anybody’s first choice: Nicaragua, Venezuela, Nauru and Syria. This is not Ukraine 2022. It is a far more nuanced conflict that does not necessarily merit the opprobrium that subsequent acts of Russian aggression have occasioned, and we would be better off employing some cold, calculated realpolitik – recognising their independence is low-hanging fruit which at the right moment should be exchanged for something meaningful in return, perhaps even as part of a settlement in Ukraine.

Yet this assumes Russia actually wants annexation. Given their diminutive sizes, it’s clear that Russia is more than capable of annexing them both, so why doesn’t it? David Petraeus and Andrew Roberts articulate Russia’s pre-2022 foreign policy well in Conflict – a book I read earlier this year – centring on a 2013 speech by General Gerasimov, now Chief of the General Staff, that laid out the grey zone and hybrid warfare doctrine behind this approach. It anticipated the annexation of Crimea the following year by stealth and was extraordinarily effective in projecting Russian power, all the more so in the wake of Ukraine, because now we know that Russia’s true military capabilities are not as impressive as once seemed. I’m not questioning the objectives, only how well they were achieved. If the aim was to sow discord and prevent former USSR countries from joining organisations like the EU and NATO, then it was very effective.

Post-2022, it’s harder to assess whether this remains the aim, because Russia’s naked aggression and territorial maximalism has changed the equation. Where once it could hide behind ambiguity, it is now being met with meaningful resistance from the West. The question of why it chose to change tack is not one for this blog and frankly baffles me. However, it does leave an open question about what this means for the territories under Russian control in Georgia.

Four years into the Ukraine war, nothing has really changed in Abkhazia or South Ossetia’s standing, which suggests that Moscow is ultimately happy to keep the status quo. Georgian politics are instructive here. The Georgian Dream party has held power since 2012 and is reasonably conciliatory towards Russia, making the calculus straightforward. Why risk provoking a significant public backlash in Georgia – one that would likely shift its politics westward – when the current arrangement preserves all the leverage, with an even more credible threat of follow-through in the wake of Ukraine?

In my mind the trajectory here, short of a paradigm shift in Russian politics, is inevitable. These two republics are too small to become truly independent, have no desire to be part of Georgia, and are slowly but surely being pulled into Russia’s orbit. In South Ossetia the case is clearer still, with the north already fully integrated into the Russian Federation. And in a sense, for the people who live there, you would hope it happens sooner rather than later, because I’m not sure being a pawn is terribly beneficial to them in an economic sense, as my travails at the border only underscored. The path forward is probably something closer to the Chechen model: considerable internal autonomy, in exchange for unconditional deference on matters of security.

An interesting space to watch for sure.

Postscript: I had a delightful dinner on my last evening in Tskhinvali at the home of our guide’s friend, who showed that alcohol is perhaps an even greater linchpin of Ossetian culture than it is in Britain. Being good, God-fearing Christians here, toasts were made in triplets, accompanied by shots of Chacha – typically home-brewed and whose strength ranges between 40–75% – which naturally had to be finished each time. Then we moved to wine. After discovering I was British, and so naturally able to handle my booze, my glass was upgraded to a ram’s horn, undoubtedly the coolest vessel I have ever drunk from. At this point, my memory starts to get a little blurry but suffice to say many more horns were knocked back as the seemingly endless toasts continued. Somewhere in this I spotted a backgammon board laid out and so challenged the host to a game. And while I’m pleased to report I gave him a good drubbing, it did me no favours at the time as he proceeded to ply me with more booze, in celebration or saltiness I couldn’t say. Thankfully the border guards were more efficient on my way out, who sensibly seeing my sorry state likely determined it was best to send me on my way before I started colouring their lovely white snow.

Postscript: Since visiting, South Ossetian president Alan Gagloev has resigned, accepting an adviser role at the Kremlin. His departure followed the appointment of a Russian official as prime minister, under an agreement Gagloev himself described as the “beginning of the reunification of the Ossetian people.” With a presidential election due in September, it is looking increasingly as though the trajectory I described above may be playing out rather sooner than expected.