On this day in 2008, Russia invaded Georgia: Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

The words are from Winston Churchill in 1948, but Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine in 2014 and again in 2022 prove their enduring relevance. When will we ever learn?

BY MICHAEL ANDERSEN

As you can see, I was a pretty grumpy guy already eight years ago. I guess that is what spending a lot of time in Moscow in the early 1990s in Moscow around Mikhail Gorbachev, Eduard Shervardnadze, and Aleksandr Yakovlev will do to you. Because - whatever people will tell you young folks today - we did have a chance back then for democracy and international security in Europe. But naive, incoherent Western policies made sure that “the usual crooks” stayed in power in the East. Vladimir Putin is simply one of them, the über crook.

Of the three Soviet leaders I mentioned, Yakovlev was the real father of Perestroika, Glasnost and New Political Thinking which the more photogenic Gorbachev got the credit for. Whatever people in the former Soviet Union today say about them, these guys tried. Yes, they did not go far enough, and true, Gorby harboured silly, unrealistic ideas of saving the Union. The much more clear-eyed Yakovlev - whom I got to know very well, I would even call him a friend - often told me that he knew that his Glasnost - which he called “the biggest democratic experiment in history” - would end with the break-up of the Soviet Union. “But we need to develop real democracy before that happens,” he explained to me in 1990, “otherwise we will simply leave behind a string of mini-USSRs, with the same crooks in charge as today.” Sure, you can argue that Yakovlev was playing “big brother,” trying to control the process, but history has proven him right. Sadly right. Brutally right.

Of course, as we know, the Soviet republics soon broke away from Moscow, apart from the Baltics. As a result, most of them are still today run by the same crooks that Yakovlev warned against, their sons, or their closest associates.

And what is as bad - and what has enabled these crooks hugely - it has taken Western politicians 30 years - THIRTY YEARS, ladies and gentlemen - to figure that out. Recently, here on Two Old Grumpy Men on Ukraine, we published a long interview with the German Ukraine expert Andreas Umland. (And this guy really is an expert, living in Ukraine for many years, speaking the language etc., as opposed to many other “experts” who parachuted in recently). Umland told me that his analysis shows that the cognitive failure of Western politicians and opinion makers to grasp Putin’s goals and methods in Ukraine led to weak policies that only encouraged Putin to invade. “The West failed Ukraine, and basically delivered Ukraine to Putin” is Umland’s conclusion.

On the 16th anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Georgia, I will suggest that not just Georgia but almost all of the former Soviet Union have been royally fcuked by Western ignorance in much the same way as Ukraine has. Although luckily, so far, with fewer casualties.

And even today - after Bucha, Irpin and Mariupol - there are still voices in the West urging reconciliation with the little KGBist in the Kremlin. And over the coming winter, you will be hearing them louder and louder.

In November 2003, Misha Saakashvili and his merry band of reformers—many Western-trained and English-speaking—had taken power in Georgia with their Rose Revolution, possibly the most genuinely positive event in the region since the fall of the Soviet Union, until the EuroMaidan Revolution erupted in Ukraine in 2013-2014. Misha pursued real democracy in Georgia and an end to corruption as well as painful economic reforms, in order to modernise the country and bring it into the West.

By 2008, many Western leaders - led by the inimitable George W. Bush - were making promises to the Georgians about NATO membership - or at least a clear and direct path to membership, the so-called Membership Action Plan (MAP). Western politicians kept repeating two things: “Georgia will become a member of NATO” and “It is not a question of if, but when.” Does this sound familiar, Ukrainians?

"Russia will not have a veto over what happens next in Bucharest (at the NATO summit),” assured President Bush. In January 2008, a referendum showed that 77% of Georgians were in favor of NATO membership.

Exactly how close Western leaders came to actually promising Saakashvili that Georgia would become a member of NATO is still unclear. Anders Fogh Rasmussen, at the time Danish Prime Minister (and later NATO General Secretary), recently admitted that Ukraine and Georgia were indeed promised membership. “It was a mistake back in 2008 to promise membership and then do nothing to follow it up. And we should not repeat that mistake.”

“Georgia is a beacon of liberty for this region and the world,” W said at the beginning of 2008. “The path of freedom you have chosen is not easy, but you will not travel it alone ... the American people will stand with you.” Sounds familiar?

But then, in February 2008, Putin issued a warning in no uncertain terms: “Russia could aim nuclear missiles at Ukraine if its neighbor and a former fraternal republic in the Soviet Union join NATO.” Sounds familiar? Russian academics and pundits made it clear that Georgia and Ukraine were “Russia’s backyard.” Sounds familiar?

Therefore, in April 2008, at the NATO summit in Bucharest, Germany and France blocked a membership action plan for Georgia and Ukraine. Their argument was that a membership promise to Tbilisi and Kyiv would provoke Russia and that surely a peaceful solution could be found. Sounds familiar? It was an obvious fob off to Tbilisi. Four months later, in August 2008, Russia invaded Georgia.

After five days of fighting, France, led by its publicity-hungry president Nicolas Sarkozy, brokered a peace agreement that left Russia occupying 20 percent of Georgia’s territory. And today, 16 years later, Russia is still occupying 20 percent of Georgia. Sounds familiar? At first, Georgian President Saakashvili was decidedly hesitant to sign the agreement, but Sarkozy explained to him that this was the best he would get. (This may soon come to sound familiar to Ukrainians.)

"Historians will come to view Aug. 8, 2008, as a turning point,” wrote military historian Robert Kagan in a piece prophetically called “Putin Makes his Move.” The Russian invasion "marks the official return of history,” concluded Kagan. The invasion of Georgia was the first time since the break-up of the Soviet Union that Russia had used its military against an independent state.

Since the good times of Gorbachev, many Western leaders had displayed a naive belief that they somehow could build a personal report with Russian leaders. Gorbachev had laughed with Reagan (and that helped end the Cold War, no doubt), and Bill Clinton laughed with Boris Yeltsin (and that got him re-elected with massive Western help, no doubt). And then, it was the turn of Bush Jr. and the former KGB agent Putin.

"I looked the man [Putin] in the eye”, W said in 2001 after their first meeting, “I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy. We had a very good dialogue. I was able to get a sense of his soul, a man deeply committed to his country and the best interests of his country … I wouldn't have invited him to my ranch if I didn't trust him." Please, do yourself a favor and watch the video.

It is, of course, unsurprising that poor W got Putin and his ilk wrong. But that so many others did? And still do? The signs have been there to see for all, for 20 years.

Already in 2005, Putin had declared the break-up of the Soviet Union to be “a genuine tragedy … the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.” In 2007, Putin gave his famous speech in Munich, where he denounced NATO expansion and aggression, followed in 2008 by Russia’s invasion and occupation of Georgia and the Sarkozy deal that dropped Abkhazia and Ossetia in Putin’s lap. Still - by 2009, Hilary Clinton and her team were ready to proclaim a ‘reset’ in relations with Russia. Followed, of course, by Putin’s invasion of Crimea and Donbas in 2014. (Nevertheless, as late as 2015, Clinton was still defending the reset as a good idea.)

(Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and U.S. Secretary of State Hilary Clinton laughing together in 2009, a few months after Russia’s invasion of Georgia.)

As mentioned, Umland suggests that Western politicians and opinion makers simply have failed to grasp Putin’s goals and methods in Ukraine and that this led to weak policies by the West that directly encouraged Putin to invade. It is difficult to disagree with Umland.

Maybe they should have listened to John McCain, who, yes, was born with a golden spoon but also spent years under torture in a Vietnamese prison and, according to himself, learned more about the nature of the powerful there than anywhere else. As far back as in 2007, McCain, as a direct response to President Bush’s praise of the Russian leader and their personal relationship, stated that “when I looked into Putin's eyes, I saw 3 letters: a K, a G and a B.”

In 2014, 11 years later, after Putin invaded Ukraine for the first time, McCain said: “Putin is an old KGB apparachik … there is no doubt about what he is. Why would anybody think that he was anything more complicated than that?”

In 2022, Gideon Rachman, international affairs commentator at the Financial Times, wrote a piece called “Understanding Vladimir Putin the man who fooled the world”: “Looking back, it is clear that the outside world has consistently misread him [Putin]. From the moment he took power, outsiders too often saw what they wanted and played down the darkest sides of Putinism.”

It should be mentioned that Georgia and Ukraine are only the worst examples of independent countries in the former Soviet Union, where the little KGBist is messing about. He is doing his best/worst to de facto rule the rest of the Caucasus, Moldova, as well as Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, and of course, Belarus.

To neutral and informed observers, this has all been crystal clear for almost two decades, but most of our politicians and many opinion makers seemingly only realized it two years ago. History will judge them harshly. Good. Because our leaders’ lack of understanding of Putin - and their stubborn unwillingness to learn - have cost Ukrainians and Georgians very dearly. And 14 years lapsed between Russia’s invasion of Georgia and its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. “Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it,” as Churchill said. Next up?