A STATEMENT by prime minister Vladimir Putin, that the breakaway region of South Ossetia could become an integral part of the Russian Federation, has increased tensions between Russian and Georgia and put further pressure on the “re-set” of relations between the Russian Federation and the United States.
Mr Putin, speaking to a gathering of members of the pro-Kremlin youth group Nashi at their Sterliger Camp north of Moscow, said it was clear that an amalgamation of the Georgian region of South Ossetia and the Russian region of North Ossetia was possible.
South Ossetia was the flashpoint which ignited a short Russo-Georgian war in 2010 in which Russian forces overwhelmed their Georgian opponents. An EU investigation found that Georgia had started the war but that the Russian response was disproportionate.
Mr Putin’s statement was followed by an announcement by the Russian Central Election Commission that voters in South Ossetia and in the other Georgian breakaway region of Abkhazia would be able to participate in Russian parliamentary elections in December.
It is estimated that up to 170,000 voters could become involved in the plan, with 125,000 in Abkhazia and the remainder in South Ossetia according to interviews with the commission's secretary, Nikolai Konkin, in the Moscow newspapers Kommersantand Rossiiskaya Gazeta.
Both regions have anomalous status in Russia’s world view. Russia, with a handful of other countries, has recognised both regions as independent states but at the same time has granted their inhabitants Russian passports.
South Ossetia is linked by tunnel through the Caucasus mountains to its fellow Ossetes in Russia’s North Ossetia, an area which has suffered severely in the ethnic conflicts that have bedevilled the region. The most serious of these took place in the town of Beslan in 2004. Then, 380 North Ossetian people, mostly children, were killed after a band of Chechen terrorists took over a school and held its children to ransom.
In the Soviet era, the division of North and South Ossetia into nominal Russian and Georgian zones made little difference as the entire USSR was ruled from Moscow. After the Soviet Union was dissolved, however, the Ossetes found themselves divided between Russia and Georgia.
A similar situation arose in the larger region of Abkhazia, which had been given to Georgia by Joseph Stalin. He was himself a Georgian and was colonised by Georgian migrants under a scheme set up by another Georgian, Lavrenty Beria, the head of the Soviet secret police.
Almost immediately upon the USSR’s dissolution, Abkhaz forces, aided in some cases by Chechen militants, drove Georgian troops and thousands of ethnic Georgian refugees into Georgia proper.
The elections for the Russian parliament, the State Duma, are a prelude to the more important Russian presidential elections which take place next spring.
It has not been decided if Mr Putin will run for the third term or whether the current president, Dmitriy Medvedev, will go for a second term. Either of them would be guaranteed overwhelming support in the two regions.