Simon Tisdall
Rusia fights back
(The Guardian,  August  11, 2008)

            When Vladimir Putin cut short his trip to the Beijing Olympics and flew back to visit troops involved in the fighting with Georgia over South Ossetia, he showed who really runs Russia. Putin may now be "only" prime minister, succeeded as president earlier this year by his protégé, Dmitry Medvedev. But it's clear the former KGB spy is still very much in charge.
            Russia's disproportionately violent response to Georgia's ill-advised attempt to assert full control over the breakaway region of South Ossetia has Putin written all over it. Rather than resting content with the retreat of most Georgian forces, Moscow escalated and broadened the conflict, bombing airfields and port facilities far removed from South Ossetia, sending tanks and troops into Abkhazia, another disputed region inside Georgia.
            Having agreed with George Bush and China's leaders in Beijing that "nobody wants war", Putin has so far rejected all offers of international mediation, blocked UN security council peace moves and – according to the Bush administration – used strategic bombers, ballistic missiles and a naval blockade to gain territorial and political advantage.

If this is not "war", you could have fooled most Georgians.
           
            US spokesmen say they "do not understand" Russia's attitude and tactics. But it seems plain enough that Putin is ruthlessly exploiting Georgia's initial mistake to permanently establish control over South Ossetia, Abkhazia and possibly other chunks of Georgian territory. This aim serves a number of purposes. It will be seen as a boost for Russia's national pride and regional authority. It will discourage Nato from admitting Georgia (and Ukraine) as a member. And it will weaken and destabilise the pro-western government in Tbilisi.
            This sort of aggressive, no-holds-barred behaviour by the judo fighter Putin should come as no surprise. Western leaders try to maintain the illusion that they are dealing with a "normal" government in Moscow that shares their world view and standards of behaviour. But in doing so, they succeed only in duping themselves.
            As Alan Cowell, a British journalist working for the New York Times, makes plain in a forthcoming book on the notorious 2006 murder of Alexander Litvinenko, the regime created in Moscow by Putin over the past eight years is abnormal, if not wholly dysfunctional – and is apparently capable of almost anything.
            Cowell's investigation provides chilling insight into the way former KGB men and other security apparatchiks stealthily seized the levers of national governance, became rich beyond imagination and systematically set about eliminating perceived threats to their monopoly of power.
            According to research conducted at Moscow's Institute of Sociology, cited by Cowell, "a full quarter of the top 1,000 people in Russia's presidential administration, government ministries, parliament and regional authorities had a formal and acknowledged background in the intelligence services or the military". If those affiliated to such agencies were included, "the number rose to a staggering 78%".
            In other words, Putin, the former cold war spy, has created a government dominated by secret service insiders with a mentality to match. They yearn for the lost days of superpower, they want Russia to be great again, they resent what they perceive as the overbearing, patronising attitude of the western democracies, and they believe they have the means – vast oil and gas revenues – to "re-balance" the world in Russia's favour.
Putin is on record as saying that the collapse of the Soviet Union was the biggest catastrophe of the 20th century. Asked last year whether Russia was slipping back into a cold war mindset, he replied: "We are, of course, returning to those times."
            This is partly what Putin's punitive tour de force in Georgia is about. It also provides the context for Litvinenko's still unresolved death. A former intelligence agent turned dissident exiled in London, Litvinenko broke several of the KGB state's cardinal rules. He became a whistleblower, revealing the activities of death squads. He sided with Boris Berezovsky, an exiled oligarch and sworn enemy of Putin.
            He personally accused Putin of ordering the infamous 1999 apartment bombings outside Moscow that were blamed on Chechen terrorists (and helped trigger the second Chechen war); and he linked Putin to the assassination of a leading journalist, Anna Politkovskaya, shortly before his own death. More than that, his investigations may have compromised senior Kremlin figures involved in clandestine, multi-million dollar deals involving the sale of state assets. All such claims are flatly denied.
            But it's possible Litvinenko's biggest "crime" was none of the above. By constantly attacking and criticising the Kremlin, Litvinenko was deemed guilty of betraying the Putin-era dream of a great and powerful new Russia rising from the ruins of the Soviet Union. A poisoned Litvinenko died a terrible death. Current Russian actions in Georgia are killing many more.