Putin has been pressuring Georgia for years. Indeed, Russian despots have long considered the southern Caucasus, along with Eastern Europe and the Baltic States, their personal stomping grounds. There is no need to rehearse the long, complicated, and bloody history; suffice it to say that the tradition did not end with the Soviet empire. In the Caucasus, for example, Russia almost certainly had a hand in the fall of Georgian nationalist president Zviad Gamsakhurdia in 1992, as well as that of Azerbaijan's president Abulfaz Elchibey in 1993. Both were replaced by pro-Moscow strongmen. But Russian hegemony over Georgia was upset in November 2003, when the pro-Western democrat Saakashvili came to power.
Putin has used Georgia's territorial conflicts with the breakaway provinces of Abkhazia and South Ossetia to weaken Saakashvili personally and undermine the Georgian people's national aspirations. To that end, Russia began to distribute passports to the Abkhazians and South Ossetians as early as 2004. It used its power to appoint Russians and pro-Moscow locals to positions in the territories' independent governments. And it built up its military presence in both places under the guise of peacekeeping operations.
From March to May Russia imposed an escalating series of import restrictions, first on wine, vegetables, and fruits; then on sparkling wine and brandy, finally Georgian mineral water--at the time one of the country's most important exports." That July, Lucas continues, "Russia abruptly closed the only legal land border crossing" with Georgia. It was the equivalent of a blockade. Georgia had done nothing to provoke these punitive measures. It was Saakashvili and democracy that offended Putin.
On September 27, 2006, Saakashvili ordered the arrest of four Russian GRU officers whom he accused of plotting a coup. He paraded them in front of the cameras. Moscow was not amused. Putin recalled his ambassador from Tbilisi and, according to Lucas, "cut postal, phone, and banking links with Georgia." Gazprom, the Russian energy giant, announced a price spike specific to Georgia. The following month Putin's government began to detain and expel ethnic Georgians living in Russia--more than 2,300 of them, according to a report by Human Rights Watch.
"Russian authorities denied basic rights to many of the detained," the authors from Human Rights Watch wrote, "including access to a lawyer or the possibility of appealing the expulsion decision taken against them. Most were given trials lasting only a few minutes. Georgians were held in sometimes appalling conditions of detention and in some cases were subjected to threats and other ill-treatment. Two Georgians died in custody awaiting expulsion."
In March 2007, Russian military forces attacked villages in Abkhazia that had recently fallen under Georgian control. This was an illegal act, and when the United Nations investigated the incident Moscow did not cooperate. Another attack--one that failed--occurred in Georgia proper, near Tbilisi, in August 2007. Russian intransigence followed that incident, too.
Then, in April, Putin issued an order that, according to Johns Hopkins professor Svante E. Cornell, treated Abkhazia and South Ossetia "as parts of the Russian Federation." Also around this time, Russian MiGs began destroying Georgian unmanned aerial vehicles.
Such was the pattern of Russian belligerence prior to Saakashvili's commitment of ground forces to South Ossetia in early August.