Russian Foreign Policy Debates and the Conflicts in Georgia (1991–2008): Between Multilateralism and Unilateralism

Russian Foreign Policy Debates and the Conflicts in Georgia (1991–2008): Between Multilateralism and Unilateralism discusses the conflicts and crises in the former Soviet space from a historical perspective and reconstructs the often-contradictory approaches of public actors in Russia on how to deal with them. Notably, it enquires whether the actions suggested follow a “multilateral” approach, thus one based on pluralist decisions and international law, or, on the opposite, a “unilateral” one, concentrating exclusively on Russia’s own national interests, to the detriment of commonly agreed international rules. The case of Georgia, from the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991 to the “Five-Day War” in August 2008, serves as an example illustrating the Russian approaches to conflict management. Richly illustrated with empirical data, the three parts of this book show how foreign and security policy debates in Moscow and their outcomes on the ground evolved from a chaotic policy of ad hoc interventions in the 1990s to a coherent, geopolitically informed strategy of coercion and persuasion in the 2000s. About a decade and a half before the large-scale invasion of Ukraine, Moscow had already shown its willingness to go quite far in defending its interests in its traditional sphere of influence in the former Soviet space.