Putin's target in Georgia

Richard Holbrooke:

While the United States is otherwise preoccupied, this small former Soviet republic has become the stage for a blatant effort at regime change, Russian-style. Vladimir Putin is going all out to undermine and get rid of Georgia's young, pro-American, pro-democracy president, Mikheil Saakashvili. Putin is assuming that the United States, overwhelmed by Iraq and needing Moscow's support on North Korea and Iran, will not make Georgia a "red-line" issue and that the European Union, fearful of endangering energy supplies from Russia, will similarly play it down.

Much is at stake: Putin's long-term strategic goal is to create a sphere of Russian dominance and hegemony in the vast area the Soviet Union and the czars once ruled. If he succeeds in bringing down the most independent and pro-Western leader in the former Soviet space outside the Baltics, he will have gone a long way toward his goal. Also at stake: President Bush's "freedom agenda," stability in the Caucasus and the European Union's attitude toward a small European country on the edge of the world's most volatile region.

Putin's methods are brutal. He has expelled at least 1,700 Georgians since October, cracked down on Georgian-owned businesses, made repeated statements about preserving the Russian market for real Russians and demonized Georgians as a criminal class. He has doubled natural gas prices two years running and cut off all direct rail, air, road, sea and postal links between the two countries. Russia has also waged an aggressive international disinformation campaign to raise doubts about Saakashvili -- I have heard astonishing, wholly undocumented charges about his alleged corruption and his "hot-headed" style in Berlin, Brussels and even Washington. In Tbilisi today, you can hear an ugly word for this that rises out of the depths of 19th-century Russian history: pogrom.

In fact, the 38-year-old Saakashvili represents almost everything the United States and the European Union should support. He led the peaceful 2003 Rose Revolution that overthrew the corrupt regime of Eduard Shevardnadze. He then opened the country to Western investment, presided over a dramatic turnaround in a once-hopeless economy, and instituted massive reforms of the police and civil service. While these efforts have not been perfect -- Freedom House and other nongovernmental organizations have expressed concern about an overly cozy relationship between the government and the main media, for example -- Georgia has climbed further up the World Bank's latest annual reform survey than any other country.

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Putin has actually pushed these former republics into opposition by his heavy handedness and then he has doubled down to try and squeeze them more while allowing real threats like Iran and North Korea to build their arsenals.