Low intensity conflict: the Russo-Georgian situation after 2008

Abstract

The signature of the so-called Six-Point Ceasefire Agreement and the Agreement on Measures Implementing to the Six-Point Plan by all parties of the Russian-Georgian conflict, resulted in the international arena considering the Russian-Georgian conflict as frozen. Successive indistinguishable politicians elected as a president and prime ministers have ensured that Georgia and its problem have been forgotten by the international arena and the global mass media. Recognition of such a status has only emboldened the Russian Federation, leading it to take further steps in the area of the occupied republics and, in the longer term, the Near Abroad space. Moreover, despite its official frozen status, the active phase of the conflict has been, and continues to be, maintained by the Russian Federation by keeping military bases and border guards on Georgia’s occupied territories, as well as by carrying out a delimitation process (so-called borderisation) with the defector separatist authorities. The spikes in tensions at the so-called unrecognized borders indicate that neither side wants to tolerate a further deterioration of the security situation in that area. In the face of recent events, including Russia’s renewed aggression on Ukraine, the protracted Russian-Georgian conflict, though of low intensity, should notably return to the agenda of Russia’s talks with the West.