Russia no longer content to swallow its bitterness

When it unleashed its troops in Georgia, Russian leader Vladimir Putin was doing more than delivering a beating to a cocky former dependency. He was delivering a message: Russia is back.

Since the end of the Cold War, Russia has endured what its leaders see as a series of humiliations: The expansion of its old foe, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, to its very borders. The U.S. plan to base a missile shield on its periphery. The recognition of an independent Kosovo over the objections of Russia's ally Serbia.

Each time, Russia complained bitterly. Each time, the West went right ahead anyway. Now, a newly confident Russia grown rich on oil is pushing back, reasserting its rights as a great power.

What better place to get back at the West than in Georgia, the little Caucasian thorn whose wildly pro-Western leader has the effrontery to say he wants his country to join NATO? By making war in Georgia, the Kremlin is making it as clear as Putin's cold blue eyes that that is not happening. In our own backyard, Moscow is signaling, it is we Russians who are in charge, not the State Department or the European Union or Human Rights Watch.

More broadly, Moscow is telling the West it will no longer put up with being overlooked on the issues that matter to Russia.

"What they are saying is that ignoring Russia's interests is going to come at a price, and they've said it in a pretty brutal way," said James Collins, a former U.S. ambassador to Moscow. "They are in a position to say 'Enough is enough.' "

No one in the West can complain that we didn't see this coming. Since the days when President Boris Yeltsin ranted about the expansion of NATO into Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic, Russian leaders have complained of mistreatment by a West drunk on the taste of its Cold War victory.

To Russia, that victory was nothing less than, in Putin's famous words, "the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the (20th) century" and Russians felt it keenly as a national humiliation.

During the turmoil and economic decline of the 1990s, Moscow could only turn its cheek and receive blows such as NATO expansion or the NATO bombing of Serbia in the 1999 Kosovo war.

The days of turned cheeks appear to be over. U.S. historian Robert Kagan wrote this week that Aug. 8, 2008, the day Moscow made its move in Georgia, may come to be seen "as a turning point no less significant than Nov. 9, 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell."

With a strong, popular leader in Putin, a growing economy and a new sense of national vigor, Moscow is no longer content merely to swallow its bitterness over Western moves that it sees -- rightly or wrongly -- as hostile.

Putin has taken a tougher and tougher stand on issues such as the possible expansion of NATO to Ukraine and Georgia and the U.S. plan to put missile-defense installations in Poland and the Czech Republic. This includes a warning that Russia may point nuclear missiles at countries that hosted missile sites.

Last month, Moscow even put forward a proposal that would essentially sideline NATO and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe and replace them with a new Eurasian security system that might include China and India.

But it was Kosovo that gave Moscow its chance to strike back. When the Balkan mini-state proclaimed its independence from Serbia in February, Moscow asserted, tit for tat, that it might respond by recognizing the self-proclaimed breakaway Georgian regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia.

When NATO said at its Bucharest summit in April that it expected Georgia and Ukraine to become members one day, a furious Moscow began preparing to strike back.

Moscow upgraded relations with the separatist governments in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, beefed up its troop presence, shot down a Georgian drone and sent fighter jets over South Ossetia.

"The Kremlin's message is crystal clear: 'Don't tread on me,' " wrote Dmitri Trenin, an expert with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, for Radio Free Europe.

In the past, Moscow has often blustered about Western moves, then backed down, as it did when NATO admitted the Baltic nations in 2004. Some say it may back down again if the West shows some backbone over Georgia

But so far the Western response has been mainly rhetorical and there seems little appetite to tangle with the Russian bear over a conflict that seems obscure to many in the West. Among other things, Western leaders are worried about how turmoil in the Caucasus could affect pipelines that carry Caspian oil and gas over the region to Turkey.

(E-mail Marcus Gee at mgee(at)globeandmail.com)

(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)