Editorial

How ironic that the birthplace of the monster who unleashed the Great Terror on his people was at the centre of last week's news. For it was in the town of Gori in Georgia that Stalin was born on mid-winter's day in 1879; and from Ossetia that his father had migrated.

No doubt Vladimir Putin knows all this, knows that it was a poem about the "broad-chested Ossetian" that earned Russian poet Osip Mandelstam exile and death in one of the camps immortalised in Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago. No doubt, either, that when he invaded Georgia he remembered that Georgia had been under Tsarist rule.

The Russian Prime Minister is on record as saying that the collapse of the Soviet empire was "the greatest geo-political catastrophe of the century". He has since provided a resurgent Russia with a strong, if sometimes cynical, leadership. When, therefore, the Georgian President bombed the South Ossetian capital, he played straight into the hands of the man who provoked him and who was desperate for an opportunity to demonstrate who the strong man in the Caucasus is.

It is now crystal clear that Russia's contingency invasion plans were well prepared, the troops on near red alert. So even as Beijing put on its sparkling display to usher in the Olympics on 08-08-08, Russian troops were unleashed to protect Russia's "peace-keepers" in South Ossetia.

By the end of the week, the Russians had destroyed Georgia's military capability and much of its infrastructure. A ceasefire was signed by the Russian President but it was clear to the outside world that the Russians were delighting in deceptions and conundrums. Their tanks continued to roam at will, their aircraft bombed the port of Poti and missiles landed in the area of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan energy pipeline, one of the few that does not cross Russian territory. It may be a paradox but it is Russia the energy superpower that is the greatest threat to the West rather than its military ego. Will President Dmitry Medvedev's verbal pledge to begin withdrawing forces from Georgia today prove equally flimsy?

Russia seems to have treated South Ossetia as Hitler had treated the Czech Sudetenland. Ominously, for those who believe in numbers, the same number of years separate Hitler's invasion of Czechoslovakia from the year of Germany's defeat in the Great War, as separate Russia's invasion of Georgia from the year communism started to crumble in 1989.

As the Russians continued to play silly and dangerous beggars last week, it may have crossed some minds that strategically, they may push for the demilitarisation of Georgia; the Soviet Union loved that ploy during the Cold War. Should they suggest this, they will find implacable opposition from the United States, Georgia's ally, less implacable from the European Union, which always tends to be at sixes and sevens when a crisis breaks out. The normally voluble Silvio Berlusconi has yet to find his voice.

Point is that if Mr Putin starts to regard himself as a breaker of nations, it is a matter of time before he will turn his attention once more to Ukraine; and if in the Ukraine, why not in Latvia and Estonia, which are now full members of the EU? The pretext? Russians living in these countries; 21st century Sudetenlands waiting to be picked. But even a nationalist, hubristic Russia must pause before it ventures down that perilous road.

The West should now show Mr Putin that contrary to what he thinks, the world is not his oyster. As gold is won in Beijing, it is clear that we live in dangerous times.