Putin's Aims -- From the Heritage Foundation

Nearly two weeks ago, Russian forces crossed into Georgia, a staunch American ally in the Caucasus. While fighting has largely stopped, Russian forces remain on Georgian soil despite Russian President Dmitry Medvedev’s promises the troops would withdraw.

Heritage Foundation expert Ariel Cohen explains that Russia has five goals in its campaign against Georgia:

1. Expulsion of Georgian troops and termination of Georgian sovereignty in South Ossetia and Abkhazia;

2. “Regime change” by bringing down President Mikheil Saakashvili and installing a more pro-Russian leadership in Tbilisi;

3. Preventing Georgia from joining NATO and sending a strong message to Ukraine that its insistence on NATO membership may lead to war and/or its dismemberment;

4. Shifting control of the Caucasus, and especially over strategic energy pipelines, by controlling Georgia; and

5. Recreating a 19th-century-style sphere of influence in the former Soviet Union, by the use of force if necessary.

[K.R. agrees with the above but believes that Putin also is intent on humiliating the West, NATO, and the U.S., and demonstrating their impotence. The more we prattle without taking any effective action, the more we help him in this effort.]

This campaign could serve as a prelude to subsequent actions elsewhere in Eastern Europe, Cohen warns. In particular, Russia could turn its sights on Ukraine, which controls the strategic Crimean peninsula and has a substantial ethnic Russian minority.

Russia’s latest adventurism demonstrates that it wants to reestablish itself as a great power, Heritage’s Peter Brookes argues in his New York Post column. “Today’s Kremlin is cocky, nationalistic, rich and bent on asserting Russia as a great power with distinct interests - not only in its neighborhood or ‘near abroad’ - but across the globe.”

At the bottom of his article, Brookes provides a useful summary of Russia’s interests, alliances and recent troublemaking.

Cohen urges the United States and its allies to continue their opposition to the Russian incursion. They “need to send a strong signal to Moscow that creating 19th-century-style spheres of influence and redrawing the borders of the former Soviet Union is a danger to world peace.”

Georgia’s ambassador speaks at Heritage:

“The last few days have shown without a shadow of doubt that Russia is using this moment to project the message to the world that it is back as an imperial power and the free world is powerless to respond,” Georgian Ambassador Vasil Sikharulidze told a standing-room-only crowd in Heritage’s Allison Auditorium Monday.

Sikharulidze urged the free world to stand up to Russia’s aggression, which he said “can and must be resisted. The power of the free world requires unity. Otherwise, if they sense weakness and disunity, we will find ourselves in much direr circumstances very soon.”