The Obama administration's Russia strategy is all about decoupling areas where the White House and the Kremlin can cooperate, such as nuclear disarmament and Afghanistan, from unrelated areas, said McFaul. “We are deliberately not pushing for the end of the occupation of Georgia to resubmit” to Congress a nuclear treaty with Russia, he said.
But this “does not mean that we are ignoring Georgia” and not working to secure the withdrawal of Russian troops from the breakaway regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, he claimed. “We are doing these things in parallel, but we are not linking them.”
Russian approval of sanctions against Iran may have chilled relations between the two countries, but there is still enough room left for diplomacy to swing a cat. Iran plans to send a pair of Caucasus leopards to Russia to help efforts to repopulate the big cats in the Caucasus area.
Hunting and poaching have brought the Caucasus leopard to the brink of extinction; environmentalists rejoice at every occasional sighting of the animal in Azerbaijan, Armenia and Georgia. Some claim that the Azerbaijani-Armenian conflict over the disputed territory of Nagorno Karabakh has also got in the way of the leopards’ migration routes.
The Iranian gift will be placed in the Russian city of Sochi's zoo. Russia plans to start dispersing the cats on the northern flanks of the Caucasus ridge, hoping that the leopards will spread throughout the Caucasus area. Russia, in turn, is helping Iran restore the population of tigers in its northern province of Mazandaran.
There may be little love lost between Russia and Georgia, but the quarrelsome neighbors now have something in common -- their low ranking in the Global Peace Index, a scale of countries' peacefulness assembled by the Sydney, Australia-based Institute for Economics and Peace, and the Economist Intelligence Unit.
Out of a group of 149 countries, the Index gave Russia's degree of peacefulness a 143rd place finish, while Georgia appears just a notch calmer in 142nd place.
Conflict with neighbors? Check. High number of deaths from organized conflict? Check. Too many weapons? Check. The list of peacefulness criteria goes on.
The countries ranked as more ill-tempered than Russia and Georgia include Israel, Pakistan, Sudan, Afghanistan, Somalia and Iraq.
Within the South Caucasus, Armenia carries the peace torch, finishing in 119th place, while New Zealand is deemed the world's least trigger-happy country.
Baku has categorized as persona non grata a top official from one separatist Caucasus region for having observed elections in another. The Kavkazsky Uzel news site reported that South Ossetia's de facto Deputy Parliamentary Speaker Yuri Dzitsoity is not welcome in Azerbaijan anymore.
The same goes for several Russian parliamentarians, who had the indiscretion to travel to Nagorno Karabakh to monitor recent legislative polls there.
Baku, which called on the international community to give Karabakh's May 23 elections the miss, argues that Dzitstoity and other observers violated the state borders of Azerbaijan and flouted international law.
Even shoe designer Mahnolo Blahnik is agog. The world's oldest leather shoe, found in the mountains of Armenia, bears an "astonishing" resemblance to the footwear of today, Blahnik told National Geographic.
The lace-up, cowhide shoe was left behind by a person some 5,500 years ago and corresponds to a modern woman’s US size seven.
The gender of the foot is not known, but Irish biological anthropologist Ron Pinhasi, who led the research, believes that it is more likely to have been worn by a woman. (The shoe is a second "world's oldest" find for the
University College Cork scientist. Pinhasi last
year unearthed remains of the world's oldest brain as well. )
The Carrie Bradshaw of the time apparently took good care of her
footwear -- the shoe has been tanned with vegetable oil and stuffed with
grass. Found in a cave along with a child’s skull, containers of barley, wheat and apricot, the shoe offers a glimpse into pre-historic life and fashion in what is now Armenia. Scientists have a thick cover of sheep dung to thank for the shoe's preservation.
A recent letter from President Obama, sent via a high-profile courier, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, and a promise that Hilary Clinton will drop by one of these days, seem to have made the difference.
Washington, for its part, appears to blame geography for Azerbaijan's anger. Azerbaijanis, declared Gates during his visit to Baku, live in a "rough neighborhood."
“South Ossetia is no closer to genuine independence now than in August 2008, when Russia went to war with Georgia and extended recognition,” ICG concludes.
The region's economy centers on menial tasks for the Russian military, which now accounts for about one-sixth of its diminishing population. Half of its de-facto government staff comes from Russia.
"Since recognition, South Ossetia has increasingly come
to resemble a North Caucasus republic, and Moscow’s
approach to it is similar," the report finds. "Over 80 per cent of North Caucasus republics’ budgets come from the federal centre,
and, as in South Ossetia, internal political dynamics mainly
revolve around the struggle for control of these resources."
So far, that control appears to have been fairly one-sided. The hefty $840 million in aid from the Kremlin has not trickled down to the population, but rather went into the pockets of South Ossetian officials, the report claims.
Meanwhile, the roughly 20,000 ethnic Georgians who fled South Ossetia during the 2008 war are still unable to return to their homes. Often, there are no homes to which to return; a "Moscow settlement" has sprung up in one former ethnic Georgian village.
Nor are chances for peace-making with Tbilisi anywhere on the horizon. "Reintegration with Georgia is not considered at any level,
even if there were to be a change of government in Tbilisi," says ICG.
The plan has broad cultural and foreign policy implications. Russia has a long-time status as Armenia’s strategic partner and a key source of jobs for labor migrants.
The plan has also hit a nationalist nerve.
Activists holding posters “Education Only in Armenian!” gathered on June 7 in front of the National Assembly to protest the schools. The concern is that Armenian may ultimately suffer if parents take their kids to the schools in a bid to expand their future professional options.
Armenians are keen to learn anything Russian in lieu of exploring their own cultural roots, opined Armenian bard Ruben Akhverdian recently. “[T]hey don’t know what a sacred cultural ‘burden’ they carry on their shoulders,” he bemoaned.
US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates came to Baku this weekend to whisper sweet nothings into Azerbaijan's ear after a brief spell in which the Azerbaijani government had threatened to rethink relations with its American suitor.
Coming from a country that is a key route for overflights to Afghanistan, the miffed message appears to have been understood.
In his dispatch, Obama acknowledged that there are "serious issues" with Baku, but nothing that diplomatic attention cannot "address."
Gates, the first top-ranking Obama official to visit Azerbaijan, indicated during his June 6-7 visit that Baku will be seeing more of its American friends soon -- a visit by Secretary of State Clinton is also planned.
A new Russian listening post in breakaway South Ossetia will allow Moscow to track mobile communications and "air movements" all over the South Caucasus, an unnamed senior Georgian official told the United Kingdom's The Telegraph.
Construction of the surveillance station is feeding existential angst in Tbilisi, which fears that Moscow could be bracing for another strike against its 2008 war foe. “Georgia is an unfinished business for Russia,” the official was reported saying in the June 4 story.
