Cold War, Hot War & the Front Line

Plus Investment Tremors

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The most dangerous geographies today are located along fissures between West and East, open and closed societies. Ukraine and Taiwan are obvious. I’m adding Georgia to the list, a small country of 3.7 million nestled between Russia and the Black Sea.

“We left this wall just as it was in 2008,” said my guide, Zhanna Odiashvili.

In front of me was a wall (shown below) pockmarked by Russian shrapnel. I was standing in Gori, Stalin’s birthplace and the epicenter of fighting between Russian and Georgian troops just 15 years ago. Russia engineered the seizure of South Ossetia by manufacturing ethnic strife, arming extremists and bombing Georgian villages. See my previous post for more detail.

Like perhaps most of you, I didn’t notice it when it happened as I was distracted by the Beijing Olympics. That, of course, was intentional. The Kremlin knew their odds were higher if the Western media was distracted.

“How far is the front line from here?” I asked. In my mind I was thinking of the sticker I’d seen in a Tbilisi cafe noting the two parts of Georgia that Russia has occupied. Ossetia is the red area on the right, Abkhazia on the left.

“Not far,” said Zhanna, “just a short drive, and they keep moving it.”

“What?”

“Yes, the Russians keep moving the line front line a little further,” expanding the red area on the map above.

We now know that Russia’s seizure of South Ossetia was a rehearsal for Ukraine. But is Ukraine now a rehearsal for Georgia? This question has not escaped the notice of the Kremlin or Washington, each of whom are trying to figure out how to wrestle Georgia into their orbit, ideally by dark arts but, if that fails, via violence, either in the form of Russian backed troops moving south, or, perhaps, US backed Georgians moving north.

Dark Arts

“You are in danger,” a Russian told me. He himself was fleeing conscription, headed toward Portugal but waiting out the paperwork in Tbilisi. I had just relayed to him the story I shared in the Wall Street Journal in December about the FSB (the modern day KGB) calling up my Moscow-based mother-in-law to warn her (and perhaps intimidate me) that my wife is a traitor. “That means you are on their radar.”

We were sharing a meal of chicken stew in a house high up in the steep hills overlooking Tbilisi. The angle of the hills and sharp turns remind me of San Francisco or Valparaiso, Chile. The downtown is dilapidated and checkered with graffiti, edgy coffee shops and understated doors that open into excellent restaurants. We were a kilometer up over Tbilisi, obscured by thick clouds.  Below is from downtown.

“How can I be at risk in Georgia,” I asked. “If I cross into Ossetia or go up over the border, maybe, but here?”

“You don’t know? The FSB has penetrated all of Georgia,” he said.

A duh, I thought. If Russian troops are moving the border, it’s an invasion by stealth. Obviously, the FSB would maintain an active network here that they could then turn on if the Kremlin gives the green light. How naïve I am, I thought. I looked it up afterwards and other reports confirm his assertion.

“On February 24, people here were convinced that Georgia would be next,” another person told me. The date of Russia’s Ukraine invasion, Feb. 24, is as well understood here as 9/11 is in the US. “There was full-scale panic, expecting tanks to pour down from Ossetia.”

A few days later, I was at a restaurant in the center of Tbilis. I had heard English just once during my trip. A lot of Russian and Georgian, no English. Six guys sidled in and sat at the table next to us, mostly 30-somethings, one gray hair.

Typically, American tourists make a racket and I slink into the background. These guys were more subdued and we might not have heard them speaking native English to discuss what type of khachapuri to order (a Georgian delicacy of bread and cheese) if they had not been seated next to us. Their demeanor seemed, as they say, squared away.

“Where you from?” my wife asked them.

The guy who I took to be the leader looked up, his face just this side of cautious, bushy black beard.  

“Washington, D.C.,” he said.

“Really,” I answered. “I grew up there, 1970s and 1980s, when Riggins was the man at the Redskins.”

They stared at me in utter silence. My guess: US agents of some sort. I asked a source who knows more than me and he suggested they were likely from the Department of Defense. In January, the US announced $33 million in military aid to Georgia. If I had to guess, these guys were part of that.

Between the FSB and these guys I realized I was in spy-land, like Berlin before the Wall came down.

Later that night, I had tea with a Georgian contact.

“Great,” she said. “They are here? That’s exactly what we need. Please get the US military here.”

I thought about the political capital expended in Iraq and Afghanistan, on top of the loss of life and treasure. Georgia seems like a more noble application of this immense power, but I wonder if there is the political will in the US for such efforts, or even the understanding.

Political String Pulling

Before coming here, I read articles about the “godfather” of Georgian politics, Bidzina Ivanishvili, a billionaire and former Prime Minister. I pulled every lever I could to get a meeting with him, but no luck.

“We don’t even know where he is physically now,” said one contact.

In conversation after conversation, his name came up. Mr. Ivanishvili is Georgian but made his money in the 1990s in Russia. I was working in Russia as a reporter at the time. Rough and tumble is an understatement. There were plenty of contract killings, some using KGB snipers from a long way off.

Ivanishvili worked with notorious oligarchs like Boris Berezovsky (who either killed himself or was murdered) and Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who was imprisoned for 10 years and is now exiled. When I was a reporter, I spoke to both of them. These are smart, tough guys who have no fixed loyalties except to power and money. It’s possible prison changed Khodorskovsky and he now seems committed to toppling Putin. That said, when I met with him in the 90s, my impression was he was motivated by treasure and I imagine Ivanishvili is of the same ilk.

In any case, $1 billion is a lot of money in Georgia where per capita GDP is $5k.

“This isn’t Russia,” one contact told me. “We don’t have lots of billionaires, we have one.”

Ivanishvili’s wealth is tied to Russia including, I am told, shares in Gazprom, the natural gas producer. In the past, Ivanishvili has vowed to sell these shares, but I could not find evidence that he has.¹ This means that the Kremlin has leverage over his wealth.

The vast majority of the Georgian population wants close ties to Europe and entry into the European Union. EU flags dot Tbilisi. NATO and the EU have representations here. Yet, progress toward this goal is slow.

The recent attempted introduction of the foreign agent law, modeled on a similar one in Russia, sparked mass protests. The law would have tagged organizations like Shame that I visited, which advocate for democratic change, as foreign agents because they are funded by US and European grants. Introducing the law was exactly what you’d want to do if you were interested in sabotaging EU candidacy.

There are parliamentary elections here next year. It’ll be interesting to see if the the young come out and vote strongly enough to force the politicians to respond. Given Russia’s attack on Ukraine and Russia’s continued encroachment on Georgia’s land, the moral case for close Russia relations doesn’t exist. But there is an economic case. Georgia maintains a border with Russia and an enormous volume of exports going through to Russia, as do Georgia’s own domestic exports.