As Americans, when we think of Georgia, cities like Atlanta, not Tbilisi, come to mind. According to an article released on February 24th, 2022, from the official Georgian English Language News Platform, the nation threw open its borders to Ukrainian nationals fleeing the Russian Invasion. Local businesses & citizens alike offered Ukrainian refugees everything from free meals to free overnight lodging to their former Soviet brethren capable of making it to Georgia. Foreign observers worldwide have praised Georgia’s humanitarian support of Ukraine considering Georgia itself was invaded & briefly occupied by Russia during the Russo-Georgian War of 2008. For millennia, Georgia is widely recognized as sitting at the great historic fault lines straddling east & west sitting just above the Greater Middle East.
Consider this: it takes less than 24 hours to travel by car from Damascus Syria to Tbilisi Georgia; a total one-way distance of approximately 801 miles. The 1951 United Nations Refugee Convention defines a refugee as a person fleeing their homeland from events such as war or internal strife to escape persecution or certain death due to reasons associated with race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or holding of a political opinion. Therefore, as defined by this convention, all refugees are to be treated & considered equal in the eyes of international law. However, the question is: how many Syrian refugees did nations similar to Georgia accept, welcome, & accommodate in the same way they are posturing for Ukrainians?
A double standard begins to emerge suggesting all refugees are equal, but some refugees are more equal than others, particularly when measuring their sociocultural proximity to the West. However, under this particular context, what applies to Syrian refugees equally applies to Libyan, Iraqi, Yemeni, Somali, & Afghan refugees considering an April 2021 United Nations Children’s Fund Summary reported Europe granted a mere 55,000 refugees from around the world entry facing similar if not worse conditions than Ukrainians in their home countries. Perhaps there is a hidden albeit grossly underreported dynamic to the Russian Invasion of Ukraine few bother considering? This specifically concerns direct exposure to blowback from American inspired conflicts in the Middle East.
We dismiss Putin as a sore loser of the Cold War. A foolish man thinking he can singlehandedly restore the long-lost post-Soviet glory of Mother Russia. However, perhaps Putin is not as foolish as he seems while the Russian Invasion becomes increasingly psychological & pointedly dedicated to exposing Western hypocrisy? Ukraine & the rest of Eastern Europe will never be the same as the invasion stalls & reaches an inevitable impasse. Vladimir Putin came to power in 1999. He is no stranger to the world stage making his revanchist ideals well known to the world. To truly understand the origins of the Russo-Ukrainian War, one must look back to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. How did America diplomatically fail reform minded Russians when the United States became the undisputed victor of the Cold War?
How successful was Putin’s predecessor, Boris Yeltsin? Did he succeed in establishing a market economy to deny the return of post-Soviet autocracy in the form of a new national strong man? Donald Trump was accused of colluding with the Russian government to gain an electoral advantage in the 2016 presidential elections. Unbeknownst to most Americans, findings from a Washington Post article appearing on June 26th, 2020, confirmed in 1995, Boris Yeltsin peddled then U.S. President Bill Clinton to raise & ultimately finalize a multibillion-dollar loan through the International Monetary Fund to finance Yeltsin’s own presidential reelection campaign when he started faltering at the polls.
When Putin assumed power, Yeltsin left behind a legacy of institutionalized corruption pontified by the Mobitex Bribery Scandal earning a personal profit of $15 million as post-Soviet Russia became the kleptocracy it is today. What went wrong? Did the United States subsidize kleptocracy in post-Soviet Russia as clandestine policy at the expense of democracy culminating with the rise of Putin?
Yet we cannot resist wondering: if some form of supranational union could have been saved as 76% of the Soviet people wanted after voting on preservation of union back in 1991, confirmed by the Helsinki Commission, how much different would post-Soviet Eurasia be today? In the end, will NATO’s eastward expansion deter a revanchist post-Soviet Russia, with or without Putin?