Remember that one time Georgia arrested those four Russian soldiers on charges of espionage? At the time, there was a lot of speculation that the arrests were in response to Russia’s meddling in Abkhazia and Ossetia, though things never seemed to move much beyond the grumbling stage.
Except this weekend, Russia randomly expelled more than 150 Georgians in a series of punitive measures against ex-pats. Russian officials claim to be merely enforcing their normally lax health and immigration laws, though anyone taking them seriously should question why only Georgians were singled out. It is unfortunate that by-all-accounts innocent people are getting caught in the bickering. But that’s how it always seems to go.
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Joshua Foust – author of 1801 posts on Registan.net.
Joshua Foust is a Fellow at the American Security Project and the author of Afghanistan Journal: Selections from Registan.net. His research focuses primarily on Central and South Asia. Joshua is a correspondent for The Atlantic and a columnist for PBS Need to Know. Joshua appears regularly on the BBC World News, Aljazeera, and international public radio. Joshua is also a regular contributor to Foreign Policy’s AfPak Channel, and his writing has appeared in the New York Times, Reuters, and the Christian Science Monitor. Follow him on twitter: @joshuafoust
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And Georgia says it won’t allow the Russian Emergencies Ministries planes carrying them land.
I’ve been tempted on and off to write a post on this. And though I haven’t, there are tons of links on the del.icio.us-powered news wire.
Yes, I’d been wondering where the Nathan Hamm take on this was!
Anyway, I’ve just finished summarizing some of the backstory to this. If I have time later today, I might get round to blogging some of what’s going on now.
Meanwhile, the Wikipedia entry isn’t bad, although naturally it’s full of Russians and Georgians trying to get their own perspectives in there.
Both of you have a ton of great information I couldn’t really pull together too well—I have a full time job that doesn’t involve reading copious news stories. I just thought it was important to get this bit out there, the back-and-forth of seemingly punitive measures in both countries.
But this is a festering issue that doesn’t look to be improving any time soon. I hope I’m not the only one who’s worried about it.
You’re right, and I will perhaps get around to doing a post on it.
In short, I think that what Russia is doing makes a ton of sense and that the US and EU aren’t biting too hard on helping out Georgia because they’re both sick of the same thing that Russia is reacting to — Saakashvili’s periodic stirring of shit. I’m definitely sympathetic to Georgia, but I imagine that Russia is quite fed up with the heightening of tensions every couple months or so and wants to put the fear of God into and the screws to Georgia’s government to both make its domestic position weaker and to disincentivize flare-ups of conflicts over Abkhazia and South Ossetia. (Which, I think, Georgia needs in order to get sympathy and intervention from the West so that it can win back the territories.)