Russia and Georgia: Going Their Separate Ways

Abstract

For Russia, the 2008 five-day war was not about Georgia, but relations with the West. The war marked a turning point for Russia in which it has begun to build an identity based on the future rather than rooted in the past. Now that Russia has been admitted to the World Trade Organization, there is little in concrete terms that it wants from Georgia, whose leader is following the typical post-Soviet path into authoritarianism, although with a state that is more effective than Russia's.