First, speaking up clearly and bluntly about what has happened. This is not a time for diplomatic opaqueness. It is a time to distinguish unambiguously between right and wrong. It is a time for democracies to stand together. It is a time for members of our parliament – the seat of one of the world’s oldest democracies – to speak up for one of the world’s newest. Today, in Georgia’s hour of need, this instinct unites government and opposition. Second, we need urgent diplomatic efforts, in which Britain must play a leading role. Russian forces must leave Georgia right away as they are required to do under the ceasefire agreement both sides have signed. Third, Russia must pay a price.

So along with the old-school onslaught of infantry, armor and artillery, Russia mounted joint air and naval operations, appeared to launch simultaneous cyberattacks on Georgian government Web sites and had its best English speakers at the ready to make Moscow's case in television appearances. If the rapidly unfolding events caught much of the world off guard, that kind of coordination of the old and the new did not look accidental to military professionals. "They seem to have harnessed all their instruments of national power — military, diplomatic, information — in a very disciplined way," said one Pentagon official, who like others interviewed for this article disclosed details of the operation under ground rules that called for anonymity. "It appears this was well thought out and planned in advance, and suggests a level of coordination in the Russian government between the military and the other civilian agencies and departments that we are striving for today."

Western authorities should also explore the vulnerability of Russian assets abroad. At the least, they can make life difficult for the holders of those assets. Post-Soviet Russia allowed the emergence of businessmen and entrepreneurs who indeed wish to function as normal participants in world commerce. Their number, however, assuredly includes the lucky billionaires under Mr. Putin's protection. All of them want to benefit from the West's rules. That privilege should be restricted so long as Mr. Putin breaks the rules. In the world of global commerce, reputation matters. China has calculated that its own ambivalent reputation can only gain from staging the Olympic extravaganza. The glow of the Games is money in the bank. By contrast, the Putin government has embarked on a strategy that seems to believe its power grows in sync with its reputation as an international pariah, an outsider state. Mr. Bush said Friday that "Russia has damaged its credibility and its relations with the nations of the free world." True, and if the West remains firm, it can make clear to Mr. Putin that the political price of behavior beyond the pale of normal relations is high. Overrunning Georgia was easy. Life after that should not be.

The Second Georgian War By Andrei Illarionov 1. The war against Georgia was a brilliant provocation carefully planned and successfully carried out by the Russian leadership. The campaign was practically identical to the plan carried out in another theatre at another time — [Chechen warlord Shamil] Basaev’s attack into Dagestan and the beginning of the second Chechen war in 1999. 2. In the new situation that has taken shape following the war, Georgians may find a legitimate reason to recognise Georgia’s de facto loss of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. 3. The military losses of Georgia are greater than those of Russia. At the same time, however, the financial, foreign policy, and moral losses of Russia are much more significant than those of Georgia.

Americans should be appalled at the lack of attention paid to the major international security crisis in Georgia by the media, by our government and by the world community. We should have expected that the broadcast media would interrupt Olympic coverage and that cable news would begin a series of stories on the background and analysis of the Georgian war, not place Olympic biographies and stories about the John Edwards affair as lead news items. We should have expected that any major political party's presidential candidate would return from vacation to Washington in order to jointly denounce the Russians' actions in Georgia, not issue spineless statements on the moral equivalency of the Russian and Georgian positions from a Hawaiian golf course. We should have expected that through the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, we would begin a major initiative to deter any further Russian military aggression by working publicly and jointly to add what remains of Georgia and Ukraine fully into the treaty, not continue a now-moot academic debate on whether publicly backing Ukraine and Georgia might "provoke" Russian bullying.

How would you characterize the U.S. response to the crisis? Could the administration be doing more? This is a huge event. It really alters the international landscape, and the backgrounders that came out of the State Department talk as though it's just another little outbreak of instability in the third world. There's no realization that this is an event like the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. The real test of the Bush administration's policy will come in the next months--whether there is any fundamental adjustment to totally new realities in our relationship with Russia and in our awareness of the problems with the Georgian government. How will the U.S. and the world engage with Russia, after its willingness to assert itself geopolitically has reared its head so violently? The Bush administration is mesmerized by the goal of getting Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, and that's indeed a tremendously important thing to do. But there is a very real question of whether it can be done at all, and one has the impression from backgrounders and conversations that the dominant consideration in the handling of this [Georgia] crisis was to not offend Russia too much, to get cooperation above all on the Iranian nuclear issue. That seems to me very short-sighted because Russia is victorious, and they think, even if we don't, that we lost a war. The result is that Russian cooperation will come at a higher price on every issue.

Among the reformists close to Kozyrev there was a certainty that the conquest of the world had been too costly and counterproductive an enterprise. And another key idea had blossomed: the West should not be fought but embraced, imitated and invited to invest. Russia should compete within the rules of the game of market capitalism. Those diplomats understood that Russia did not have to become anybody else's counterweight, or play into a bipolarity that could only bring the nation conflict and poverty. After all, Russia was the largest nation in the West, the third Rome (the second had been Constantinople) and it made no sense to adopt an attitude of hostility toward a world that was as much theirs as it was France's or England's. All this is apropos Russia's attitude in the conflict between Georgia and South Ossetia. It is very probable that Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili acted rashly when he attacked South Ossetia in an effort to reconquer that territory, but it seems evident that Moscow had been waiting for an opportunity to strike. The attack on Georgia began on Aug. 8. On July 20, 19 days earlier, the Russians already knew Saakashvili's plans and had unleashed a cyberwar intended to dismantle the communications of their ill-tempered neighbor via the Internet. It was a magnificent moment to teach a lesson to the Georgians and the rest of the world, most especially the United States, who were sponsoring Georgia's admission to NATO.

Re “Russia’s War of Ambition” (editorial, Aug. 12): While militarily a success, Russia’s incursion into Georgia to reassert its sphere of influence in the “near abroad” is political folly. The Russian-Georgian conflict has likely pushed Georgia out of the Commonwealth of Independent States. The Baltic states, Poland and Ukraine, whose leaders have traveled to Georgia to express solidarity with President Mikheil Saakashvili, will distance themselves further from a domineering, oil-resurgent Russia. Russian military might has won the day in Georgia, but as a means of extending its influence in the region, political pressure and persuasion would have been far more effective. Lawrence P. Markowitz Oberlin, Ohio, Aug. 12, 2008

First Yukos, Then Georgia August 13, 2008; Page A15 Now the world is getting an idea of what a "war for oil" really looks like. Few in the West appreciate the degree to which Vladimir Putin and the Soviet, er, Russian, elite subscribe to a prewar view of power relations and national greatness. Their view is not based on self-reproducing institutions and innovation and the power of trade, but on territory and resources -- lebensraum, as one of their intellectual progenitors called it.

Suddenly the Russians were offering to pay Turkmenistan and Azerbaijan multiples of what they had previously offered to secure long-term supply deals. They penned an agreement with Italy and its oil company, Eni, to build a pipeline that would run under the Black Sea from Russia to Europe and end up at the same Austrian terminal as Nabucco. And Russian officials offered highly favorable transit agreements, ownership shares and guaranteed gas supplies to secure transit agreements from Bulgaria, Serbia and Hungary. To industry observers like Ed Chow, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Nabucco has always looked more like a diplomats' pipe dream than a viable economic project. Its promoters had not only failed to secure supply and transit agreements but also had yet to identify an oil company eager to champion the project and finance the pipeline. Now, with its successful military incursion, Russia has raised serious doubts in the minds of Western lenders and investors that a new pipeline through Georgia would be safe from attack or beyond control of the Kremlin. What we've been reminded once again is that Vladimir Putin is perfectly willing to sacrifice the rule of law and the good opinion of others to protect the Russian empire and the energy monopoly that sustains it. The techniques he used to bring Georgia to heel, while more lethal and destructive, have the same thuggish quality as the techniques Putin uses to silence domestic opposition and to expropriate the energy assets of Yukos, Shell and BP.

Take the positions of Germany and Italy, both headed by pro-American conservative leaders. German Chancellor Angela Merkel has led the opposition to Georgian membership in NATO. Italy's foreign minister, in the context of the current conflict, said: "It doesn't behoove us to pit ourselves against Russia. Russia is a strategic partner." Germany gets 39 percent of its natural gas from Russia. Italy gets 31 percent. Vladimir Putin has succeeded with his plan to turn Russian oil and natural gas into an instrument of state power, as chronicled by Marshall Goldman in his new book Petrostate. Bush, McCain and Obama all said that Russia had damaged its international standing and relations with the rest of the world. But that's just not true. Regardless of the outcome in Georgia, the rest of the world will continue doing business with Russia much as it has in the past. The same is probably true of the United States, as well.

Aggression against Georgia also sends a strong signal to Ukraine and to Europe. Russia is playing a chess game of offense and intimidation. Former President and current Prime Minister Vladimir Putin spoke last spring about Russia "dismembering" Ukraine, another NATO candidate, and detaching the Crimea, a peninsula transferred from Russia to Ukraine in 1954, when both were integral parts of the Soviet Union. Russia is engaged in what the Chinese call "kill the chicken to scare the monkey." Ukraine is the monkey: its pro-Western leaders, such as President Victor Yushchenko and Prime Minister Yulia Timoshenko, have expressed a desire to join NATO, while the pro-Moscow Ukrainian Party of Regions effectively opposes membership. NATO opponents in Ukraine are greatly encouraged by Russia's action against Georgia.

Russia must stand down By Joseph Biden Despite Russia’s overwhelming advantage in size and firepower in its conflict with Georgia, the Kremlin may have the most to lose if the fighting there continues. It is too soon to know with certainty who was responsible for the initial outbreak of violence in South Ossetia, but the war that began there is no longer about Georgia’s breakaway regions or Russian peacekeepers. By acting disproportionately with a full scale attack on Georgia, Moscow is jeopardising it standing in Europe and the broader international community – and risking very real practical and political consequences.

Georgia is a crucial transit point for oil and gas. Three major pipelines connecting energy sources in the Caucasus and Central Asia to European markets pass through its territory. One of these, the South Caucasus pipeline, is an important part of the plan for the Nabucco pipeline to Austria, which would deliver natural gas directly to the European Union, bypassing Russia entirely, if built. The Russian government, which controls Gazprom, the world's largest gas company, has tried frantically to cajole its European customers into ignoring Nabucco and investing instead in its own new pipelines.

Should we allow Russia to occupy Georgia or even just depose the Saakashvili government, the implications for America’s standing in Eurasia would be dire. We would risk losing the support of the post-Soviet states of Central Asia that are cooperating with the American mission in Afghanistan, along with hopes of westward exports of more Central Asian energy. Many who might agree with this analysis nonetheless shrug their shoulders over solutions. Indeed, we have no real military options against Russia. But we can put together a meaningful comprehensive reaction, attaching real costs to Russia for its policies. America must hit where it hurts: Russia’s international prestige, an obsession of Mr. Putin’s. To begin with, we must do everything possible to see Russia’s membership in the Group of 8 industrialized nations be suspended (something the Republican presidential hopeful John McCain called for even before this crisis).

Fundamentally at stake is what kind of role Russia will play in the new international system. Unfortunately, Putin is putting Russia on a course that is ominously similar to Stalin's and Hitler's in the late 1930s. Swedish foreign minister Carl Bildt has correctly drawn an analogy between Putin's "justification" for dismembering Georgia -- because of the Russians in South Ossetia -- to Hitler's tactics vis a vis Czechoslovakia to "free" the Sudeten Deutsch. Even more ominous is the analogy of what Putin is doing vis-a-vis Georgia to what Stalin did vis-a-vis Finland: subverting by use of force the sovereignty of a small democratic neighbor. In effect, morally and strategically, Georgia is the Finland of our day The question the international community now confronts is how to respond to a Russia that engages in the blatant use of force with larger imperial designs in mind: to reintegrate the former Soviet space under the Kremlin's control and to cut Western access to the Caspian Sea and Central Asia by gaining control over the Baku/ Ceyhan pipeline that runs through Georgia.

On the first day that Russia struck Georgian troops in the breakaway province of South Ossetia, the Bush administration said it was working actively with its European partners to seek an end to hostilities. Four days later, as Russian forces swarmed virtually unopposed into Georgian territory on Monday, the U.S. response was the same: "We are working very hard with the Europeans to try to resolve the conflict," said Robert Wood, the deputy State Department spokesman. Even as President George W. Bush vigorously condemned Russia's actions, calling its military expansion into Georgian territory a "dramatic and brutal escalation" that is "unacceptable in the 21st Century," there is not much the U.S. can do to protect its closest ally in the Caucasus.

Back in 2005, speaking before a crowd of more than 150,000 exuberant Georgians cheering "Bushi! Bushi!", President Bush made a promise to the people of that former Soviet republic: "The path of freedom you have chosen is not easy, but you will not travel it alone. Americans respect your courageous choice for liberty. And as you build a free and democratic Georgia, the American people will stand with you." So where was Bush as Russia launched a major military attack against Georgia? Monkeying around with the U.S. women's volleyball players -- and otherwise amusing himself at the Beijing Olympics. This is not to suggest that Bush should have sent in the Marines. But his impotence in the face of such a gravely destabilizing move highlights not only his personal loss of stature, but how deeply he has diminished American authority on the world stage generally and, particularly, in the eyes of Russia.

From Tolstoy to the poet Anna Akhmatova and the dissident physicist Andrei Sakharov, the most respected Russian intellectuals have traditionally functioned not just as cultural figures but as national symbols, moral beacons and speakers of truth. Mr. Solzhenitsyn was one of several titanic figures who staked their lives on that mission — to “defeat the lie,” as he put it — undeterred by exile and imprisonment. But today, in an atmosphere of far greater freedom in private life than existed in the Soviet period, there are no towering cultural figures who command the respect that Mr. Solzhenitsyn did in his prime. Instead of moral clarion calls, literary novelists write profanity-laced satires of consumerism. Most opposition politicians have faded from the scene rather than push to the limits against growing authoritarianism. There is no cultural counterweight to the larger-than-life figure who dominates political life, Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin. That is partly because a new generation of Russians is now awash in the global tide of infinite consumer choice. It is also because Mr. Solzhenitsyn himself helped discredit the image of the public intellectual by hectoring the nation after his return from exile in 1994. But it is above all because the political landscape is more complex: today’s authoritarianism is less monumental than Soviet repression, and so are its opponents.

After corporate warfare, real war. For investors, the Georgian conflict comes at an awful time, following appalling newsflow around Russia in recent months. Confidence has been buffeted by the shareholder fight at TNK-BP, which remains unresolved and even more by prime minister Vladimir Putin’s verbal assault on steelmaker Mechel – which hit the market harder than the conflict has done. The oil and commodity prices that have underpinned the Russian investment story are declining too. All that has sent the market down by about a third from its previous high. The consolation is that the Russian market has bounced back from plunges of similar magnitude four times in four years. At these levels – the Russian market is pricing in a risk premium of 7.7 per cent, according to Credit Suisse. On a p/e of 8.6 times it is at discount of about 20 per cent to the global emerging markets average of 10.7 – it starts to look oversold.

Not least among the geopolitical realities coming to the surface at the moment is that of just who's top dog in the Kremlin. While it's widely thought Mr. Putin's power trumps that of Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, an interesting wrinkle has emerged elsewhere in the new Russia that has modern-day Kremlinologists wondering whether the president might yet become more his own man. (...) The surprise in all this is that President Medvedev has decided to protest. "We need to create a normal investment climate in our country," the President said, without mentioning Mr. Putin. "Our law-enforcement agencies and government authorities should stop causing nightmares for business." A Medvedev adviser added that "it is not correct to destroy your own stock market . . . and wipe off $60 billion." The Russian stock market is trading at a 22-month low. The question for Kremlinologists is whether Mr. Medvedev's comments are evidence of some independence on his part and perhaps a looming power struggle, or merely amount to a good cop, bad cop routine. It would be heartening to think it's the former, and that Russia's leaders are beginning to realize there are costs to their habits of confiscation. But with foreign investors still looking to make a fast killing in Russian markets (foreign direct investment jumped by some 60% between 2006 and 2007), those costs apparently won't be paid for some time. Meanwhile, for anyone thinking of putting money into Russia, the message should be caveat investor.

Then, that disillusionment is already spreading to other countries in the region who can see that the gap between the West’s rhetoric and the reality means they have to back down even further in the face of Russian pressure than would otherwise be the case, thus further limiting the opportunities of these nations for a better future. And finally – and this is a danger that cannot be ruled out – such a disorderly recession of Western and especially American power and influence in the region means that the Russians, never all that sophisticated in gauging just where the lines are, may finally cross a red line and provoke an explosion in East-West relations that could rapidly get out of hand.

But what can Georgia’s friends and allies do about it? Mr Putin is calling their bluff. George W. Bush, the US president, poured in military trainers and equipment, backed Nato membership, and now seems powerless to do more than wring his hands. Carl Bildt, Sweden’s foreign minister, sees it as a critical challenge. “We – and Russia – will have to live with the consequences of Russia’s use of force for a long time to come,” he said at the weekend. “No state has a right to intervene militarily in the territory of another state simply because there are individuals there with a passport issued by that state. The obligation to protect people lies with the state in which those individuals are located. “Attempts to apply such a doctrine have plunged Europe into war in the past – and that is why it is so important that this doctrine is emphatically dismissed.” For Mr Putin, however, such a doctrine plays extremely well at home. He does not really care how it plays abroad. It gets him respect, of a sort, from the barrel of a gun.

Russia has long ceased to pretend to be a neutral referee. It openly espouses the cause of the secessionists there and in Abkhazia, another breakaway enclave. Its actions seem aimed at deliberately destabilising its neighbour. In recent months – especially since Georgia was promised eventual membership of Nato at the alliance’s Bucharest summit in April – Moscow has stepped up its encouragement, reinforcing its troops and trade, as if deliberately taunting Tbilisi and daring its hot-headed president to respond. Now the inevitable has happened. Mr Saakashvili does not want to take on Moscow. But Mr Putin (and Dmitry Medvedev, his anointed successor) seem to want to prove two things: that Georgia is far too unstable to join Nato, and that they alone can determine the future of the former Soviet space. They are right that neither the US alone, nor the Nato allies, would dream of intervening in a military confrontation. But Georgia is only unstable because of Russian policies. Encouraging secessionists sends a terrible signal to others inside Russia, especially in the rebellious north Caucasus. Moscow’s policy may be macho, but in the long run it will be utterly self-defeating.

"Domestically, Russia needs an independent legal and law-enforcement system free of political interference and one that won't be used to assist private parties in civil disputes. It needs the consistent application of the rule of law. And it must recognize that an all-powerful, fear-inducing intelligence organization isn't the appropriate training ground for leaders of a liberal democracy."

Eurasianism posits a unique civilizing role for Russia on the world stage and holds as its ideal the creation of a paternalistic, corporatist state, similar to the one Franco built in Spain. But it was the economic program of Eurasianism that attracted the most attention, as it acknowledged the market and "economic pragmatism" but clearly subordinated these concepts to political ends. The Eurasianists do not adhere to the idea of the sanctity of private property, arguing that property cannot be "absolute or abstract, but only relative and concrete." In addition, Eurasianists hold that property owners do not enjoy absolute freedom to dispose of their property as they see fit, but are instead responsible before society. And the more "socially significant" their property is, the greater the owner's responsibility and, consequently, the less his or her freedom. In the final analysis, the owner of capital is under the control of society and the state in terms of its ultimate disposition. Looking back at Russia's development over the last decade, including the redistribution of property and the establishment of numerous state corporations, it is amazing to see how well actual practice in the country corresponds with Eurasianist theory. One only has to recall the strange pronouncements by several oligarchs during the period of the national elections at the end of last year and the beginning of this to the effect that they are ready at any moment to surrender their fortunes if the state demands it.

Consequently, the growth of Chinese civil society, as measured by the number or quality of its NGOs, has woefully lagged behind China’s economic growth. China has more than 350,000 legally registered NGOs, but perhaps only about 10 per cent of them can be considered genuine NGOs in the western sense. Most of the rest are so-called “government-organised non-governmental organisations”, or Gongos, an appellation that would make George Orwell proud. As a rule, Gongos are affiliated with a government bureaucracy, headed by retired officials and funded by the state. They have no genuine autonomy. Even among genuine NGOs, one cannot find civic groups, such as independent labour unions, student unions and religious groups, which are capable of large-scale collective action. Most Chinese NGOs are small groups engaged in leisure activities, environmental protection and local charity work like health and education. A promising development may be the formation of local chambers of commerce in Zhejiang province, where the private sector accounts for more than 90 per cent of the economic output. But this is the exception that proves the rule.

Speaking from Beijing, Mr Murdoch signaled News Corp’s growing enthusiasm for Asian markets – particularly India and China – while apparently cooling on Russia and Eastern Europe. “The more I read about investments in Russia, the less I like the feel of it,” Mr Murdoch said. “The more successful we’d have been, the more vulnerable we’d be to having it stolen from us. Better we sell now.”

The deal between Prokhorov and Potanin may be part of a plan endorsed by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin to create a diversified mining company big enough to compete with BHP Billiton Ltd., said Stanislav Belkovsky, an independent political analyst who advised the Kremlin during Putin's presidency.

The 68-year-old granddaughter of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev has filed a series of lawsuits against a state-owned TV network for airing a docudrama that, she says, falsely depicts her father, Leonid, as having been shot as a traitor in World War II. These allegations of her father's treachery, which historians dismiss, have been published more than a dozen times in books, magazine articles and newspapers in the post-Soviet era, and sometimes she cannot bring herself to read them. "I am not that brave," she says. Some members of the Khrushchev family and others say the persistent rumor is part of a quiet battle of political symbols, in which the champions of a strengthened state have tried to weaken democratic institutions. The aim, they say, is to burnish the reputation of strong leaders, such as former President Vladimir Putin and Stalin, by tarnishing that of Khrushchev — who denounced Stalin's mass arrests, executions and deportations in a secret 1956 speech to the Communist Party leadership that later became public.

The challenge of building an enclave for Russia's wealthy elite near small, poor villages lays bare a central socioeconomic tension in Russia today: The large rush of cash brought on by high oil and gas prices has created an ever-widening gulf between the super-rich and the rest of the country. Moscow has more billionaires — 74 — than any other city in the world, according to Forbes magazine, and Russia is second, with 87 billionaires in all, only to the United States. Agalarov is one of them; he puts his net worth at more than triple Forbes' estimate of $1.2 billion. Meanwhile, the average salary in Russia is about $720 a month, and inflation is in double digits, according to official statistics. (...) A band of residents in the nearby village of Voronino — a feisty collection of pensioners, their children and middle class Muscovites who spend the weekends there — has waged a campaign of letters and complaints to Russian officials alleging that Agalarov tried to force them to sell their property. The villagers told the regional prosecutor's office that after a round of menacing phone calls to those who wouldn't sell, a local dog was shot, another had its throat slit, and a bathhouse was burned down.

This is a very sad book, the story of thousands of Americans who, during the Depression, lured by sham Soviet propaganda and pro-Soviet falsehoods spread by the likes of George Bernard Shaw and the corrupt New York Times Moscow correspondent, Walter Duranty, migrated to the USSR in search of jobs and a role in the "building of socialism." It was, in the words of the author, "the least heralded migration in American history" and a period when "for the first time in her short history more people were leaving the United States than were arriving." Most of these expatriates, not intellectuals but simple working men, were quickly disenchanted and wanted to return home, only to find that Moscow considered them Soviet citizens and barred them from leaving. Ignored by the American government, many of them ended in the gulag. In Tim Tzouliadis's "The Forsaken" (Penguin Press, 436 pages, $29.95), their dismal story is told with great skill and indignation usually missing from Western accounts of communist Russia.

The first, unstated, aim of the new Russian plan, based on what Mr Medvedev calls “21st-century realities”, seems to be to weaken, supplant, or outright replace the OSCE. Russia has already put the OSCE’s election-monitoring outfit under intense political and budget pressure (and blocked its observers’ visas in both recent Russian elections). Conveniently, Kazakhstan, a Russian ally, will be running the OSCE (into the ground, some think) in 2010. Another element in the Kremlin plan is to get the outside world to take seriously Russian-led outfits such as the Collective Security Treaty Organisation, the Eurasian Economic Union, the Russian-Belarusian Union and the Commonwealth of Independent States. These bodies are so obscure and bureaucratic that they make the even the lame-duck OSCE seem important. The West has shunned official contact with them, seeing them as mere vehicles for Russia’s post-Soviet grandstanding. The Russian plan would give them similar ranking to the EU and NATO.