Turkish Forum

Category: Eastern Europe

  • Georgia challenges Russia to detain its ships in Abkhaz waters

    Georgia challenges Russia to detain its ships in Abkhaz waters

    TBILISI, September 15 (RIA Novosti) – Georgia said on Tuesday it would resist any attempts by Russia to detain its ships in the waters of its former province of Abkhazia.

    A Russian border protection service official said earlier in the day that Russian border guards would detain all vessels that violate Abkhazia’s maritime border. Tbilisi considers Abkhazia and its waters part of Georgian territory, and has declared any unauthorized maritime shipments of goods illegal.

    The Georgian Foreign Ministry condemned the Russian statement and said it would not tolerate any attempts to detain its ships.

    In a statement Georgia said, it “is determined to block any pirate-like actions on the Russian side by all legal, diplomatic and political methods available.”

    It stressed that in accordance with the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, Abkhazia’s 12-mile maritime zone, as well as the special zone and continental shelf, is part of Georgia.

    Georgia seized the Panama-flagged Buket tanker and its cargo of gasoline and diesel fuel off Abkhazia last month as it sailed from Turkey to the tiny republic on the Black Sea.

    Abkhaz Foreign Minister Sergei Shamba said in early September that Abkhazia was ready to resort to force as President Sergei Bagapsh had given the order “to open fire on Georgian ships if they continue their acts of piracy.”

    Russia recognized Abkhazia and another former Georgian republic of South Ossetia last August after a five-day war with Georgia over the latter, which was attacked by Tbilisi in an attempt to bring it back under central control. Most residents of both Abkhazia and South Ossetia have held Russian citizenship for several years.

    Under mutual assistance treaties signed last November, Russia pledged to help Abkhazia and South Ossetia protect their borders, and the signatories granted each other the right to set up military bases in their respective territories.

    Russia’s Defense Ministry has said it plans to open a base in Gudauta, in the west of Abkhazia, and staff it with at least 1,500 personnel by the end of this year.

  • Russia: Asserting Influence in the Black Sea

    Russia: Asserting Influence in the Black Sea

    Stratfor.com
    September 15, 2009

    Summary

    The Russian maritime border patrol chief said Sept. 15 that Russia will detain any ships illegally entering the waters of Georgia’s breakaway republic of Abkhazia. Moscow’s warning is aimed at Georgia, which has used its navy to detain several vessels heading for Abkhazia. Now that Russia has officially threatened to capture ships, Georgia has lost another way to contain Abkhazia and will likely think twice before it detains a ship sailing to Abkhazia, as the Georgians are well aware that their navy is no match for the Russian navy.

    Analysis

    The head of Russia’s coastal division of the border guards service, otherwise known as the FSB coast guard, issued a warning Sept. 15 that it will detain any ships entering the maritime territory of the Georgian breakaway region of Abkhazia without permission. The statement was directed specifically at Georgia, whose navy and coast guard have carried out numerous detainments of cargo ships traveling to Abkhazia via the Black Sea. The latest such interception occurred Aug. 15, when the Georgian coast guard detained a ship, with a Turkish captain and a crew of Azerbaijanis and Turks, carrying $2.4 million worth of fuel heading toward the Abkhazian port of Sukhumi. The crew was released on bail, but the Turkish captain was not released until Turkey’s foreign minister traveled to Georgia to appeal the decision personally. The governments of Turkey and Azerbaijan clearly were not happy about the detainment.

    In addition to irking the ship’s crew and their respective governments, the uptick in such naval detainments off the coast of the Black Sea has particularly angered Abkhazia ­ and by extension its security guarantor in Moscow. Such hostilities have been common ever since the Russo-Georgia war broke out in August 2008, when Moscow wrestled control over the regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia from Georgia. Russia has since established a significant military presence in these regions, and tensions have been high ­ both on land and sea ­ between Tbilisi and its breakaway republics. Following the incident on Aug. 15, Abkhazian President Sergei Bagapsh threatened to open fire on Georgian ships if Georgia continued such detainments. Georgia’s leadership dismissed these claims, saying that Abkhazia lacked the military capability to carry out such attacks, referring to the Abkhazian leader’s threats as a “bluff”.

    Georgia did acknowledge, however, that if someone did have the means to respond aggressively to such detainments, it would be Russia. Until this point, Moscow had been relatively quiet about the detainments, simply issuing statements for Georgia to stop intercepting ships. But this could have been Russia’s strategy of allowing the Georgians to dig themselves in a deeper hole before making a decisive threat. Now that Russia has officially threatened to seize ships, Georgia has lost another lever for containing the Abkhazians, as the Georgians are well aware that their navy is no match for the Russian navy.

    Most of the larger warships in Georgia’s small navy were lost during the war with Russia. What remains of an already hollow naval force are mostly gunboats, including some five patrol boats fitted with old Soviet 23mm anti-aircraft artillery pieces (possibly for use as naval guns). It is these gunboats and patrol vessels that likely would be involved in any security or interdiction effort off the coast.

    Just north of Abkhazia, the Russian FSB has provided coastal security forces of its own to the breakaway republic now recognized by two countries in addition to Russia. The size and disposition of these forces are unknown; Russia has simply stated that its forces patrolling the area will seize ships and “do everything to ensure the security of the Russian state, the Abkhaz state.” While it is possible that the FSB contingent is somewhat smaller than the remaining Georgian navy, it may have the overall capacity to be more active; especially considering that Russia has significant ports in the Black Sea in Novorossiysk and Sochi, it likely has better overall access to spare parts and support from Moscow.

    The bottom line is that the difference between the two forces is not so great that the finer points of a hypothetical tactical engagement could not push the outcome in either direction. But unlike Georgia, the FSB contingent has access to reinforcements in its much larger and more powerful Black Sea Fleet that could be quickly deployed to the waters off Abkhazia (the very ones used in the August 2008 war). The issue, however, is speed. Deploying a warship to sea unexpectedly can take as much as a day on the optimistic end of the spectrum, and transit to the Georgian coast would be the better part of another day. The amount of trouble Georgia could get itself into in the intervening time also merits consideration. Ultimately, Russia has a keen interest in keeping decisive military control over the situation. And in the end, without assistance from NATO ­ assistance clearly not coming ­ the Russian Black Sea Fleet, for all its challenges from maintenance to morale, is the dominant naval reality for Tbilisi.

    As such, these new developments may suggest that Georgia will now think twice before it detains a ship heading to Abkhazia. If it does not, there very well may be a much higher price to pay the next time.

  • NATO Chief Says He’d Consider Brzezinski Plea for Russia Accord

    NATO Chief Says He’d Consider Brzezinski Plea for Russia Accord

    By James G. Neuger

    rasmussenSept. 1 (Bloomberg) — NATO said it would consider a proposal by former U.S. National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski to tighten security arrangements with a Russian-led defense alliance to ease East-West tensions.

    NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said he has an “open mind” toward ideas to soothe the strains between the former Cold War adversaries that peaked with Russia’s 2008 invasion of Georgia, a would-be NATO member.

    “We have to look closer into the possibilities of improving confidence between Russia and NATO,” Rasmussen said in an interview at North Atlantic Treaty Organization headquarters in Brussels yesterday. “I am prepared to look upon all ideas that serve confidence-building with an open mind.”

    Western governments are courting Russian help in securing supply lines for the 100,000 allied troops in Afghanistan, stemming the spread of nuclear weapons and in combating piracy off the coast of Somalia.

    Writing in the current issue of Foreign Affairs magazine, Brzezinski called for a pact with the Russian-led Collective Security Treaty Organization, a seven-nation group cobbled together out of the remnants of the Soviet Union.

    Such an agreement would go beyond the periodic high-level NATO-Russia meetings that resumed in June after the 28-nation western alliance ended a diplomatic boycott to protest the Georgia invasion.

    Brzezinski, who served under President Jimmy Carter from 1977 to 1981, wrote of a need “to consolidate security in Europe by drawing Russia into a closer political and military association with the Euro-Atlantic community and to engage Russia in a wider web of global security that indirectly facilitates the fading of Russia’s lingering imperial ambitions.”

    ‘Strategic Partnership’

    Rasmussen urged a “strategic partnership” with Russia to ward off common threats such as terrorism.

    NATO-Russia ties were strained by Bush administration plans for a missile-defense system in eastern Europe and efforts to offer alliance membership to Ukraine and Georgia, two former Soviet republics.

    Relations broke down completely when Russia rolled over Georgia’s army in a five-day war to reestablish its sphere of influence. Russia later granted diplomatic recognition to two territories, South Ossetia and Abkhazia, which declared independence and established military outposts in them.

    President Barack Obama set out to “reset” relations with the Kremlin, heralding an East-West thaw.

    Russian and NATO foreign ministers held their first post- Georgia-war meeting in Greece in June, agreeing to resume military-to-military cooperation.

    Rasmussen, 56, a former Danish prime minister who became alliance chief Aug. 1, said he had not yet read Brzezinski’s proposals and stressed that any outreach to Russia would not undermine NATO’s role as the bedrock of trans-Atlantic security.

    “The cornerstone of Euro-Atlantic security will still be NATO,” Rasmussen said.

    To contact the reporter on this story: James G. Neuger in Brussels atjneuger@bloomberg.net

    Source:  www.bloomberg.com,  August 31, 2009

  • PIRATES OF THE BLACK SEA

    PIRATES OF THE BLACK SEA

    Nezavisimaya Gazeta
    September 1, 2009

    Backed by Russia, Abkhazia promises to seize Georgian ships
    Author: Yuri Simonjan
    RUSSIA MIGHT FIND ITSELF DRAGGED INTO A CONFLICT BETWEEN
    TBILISI AND SUKHUMI AGAIN

    Backed by Russia, Abkhazia is prepared to challenge Georgia in the
    Black Sea. “They leave us no choice. We will seize Georgian
    ships,” Abkhazian Foreign Minister Sergei Shamba said. Georgia had
    seized and arrested several ships on the run to and from Abkhazia
    last month.
         Tbilisi in its turn only emphasized the resolve to board and
    detain all vessels entering territorial waters of Georgia,
    including the Abkhazian part, without permit.
         Sukhumi turned to Moscow and immediately obtained its promise
    of assistance. Ships navigating territorial waters of Abkhazia
    will be protected by Russian and Abkhazians border guards. “All
    attention was focused on the Abkhazian-Georgian land border. The
    situation at sea requires attention too,” Shamba announced.
         The Georgian Coast Guard detained 23 ships for “violation of
    the entry regulations” this year and nearly 70 over the last four
    years. The ships are almost always Turkish, Ukrainian, Russian,
    and Greek.
         “Seizing ships in neutral waters, Georgia commits acts of
    piracy. Our appeals to the UN and EU remain unanswered which only
    encourages Georgia. Tbilisi must have forgotten that Georgian
    ships pass us by on the way to Ukrainian, Bulgaria, and Greece and
    that we can respond in kind,” Shamba said.
         The minister said that the situation had been more or less
    tolerable until US Vice President Josef Biden’s visit to Georgia
    this spring. “The Georgian authorities must have been given
    assurances of some sort,” Shamba assumed. He announced that
    Georgia’s actions constitute a violation of the settlement
    agreement reached with the European Union’s help.
         Official Tbilisi pays no heed to Sukhumi’s protestations. It
    maintains that sailing into Abkhazian ports without authorization
    from the central government of Georgia is a violation that will
    not be tolerated.
         Georgian Deputy Foreign Minister David Dzhalagania said at
    the press conference this Monday that participation of Russia
    would be a height of cynicism. He added that Russia had already
    assaulted Georgia once.
         “Russia’s attempts to protect trespassers in the Georgian
    territorial waters will be appraised and treated as piracy.
    Freight traffic to Abkhazia without Tbilisi’s permit is a gross
    violation of the Georgian legislation,” State Minister for
    Reintegration Temur Yakobashvili said.
         Military expert Irakly Sesiashvili said that Tbilisi was
    trying to bite more than it could possibly chew. Attempts to
    prevent Russian ships from entering the local waters will lead to
    a dangerous confrontation or Georgia will have to cry uncle.
    Sesiashvili said the international community alone could settle
    the issue.

  • Stalin Planned to Annex Parts of Iran, Turkey and China Using Molotov-Ribbentrop ‘Model,’ Azerbaijani Scholar Says

    Stalin Planned to Annex Parts of Iran, Turkey and China Using Molotov-Ribbentrop ‘Model,’ Azerbaijani Scholar Says

    Paul Goble

    Vienna, August 31 – Stalin viewed the secret protocols of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact which allowed Moscow to seize the Baltic countries, Bessarabia, and part of Poland as “a model” for the subsequent annexation of portions of Iran, Turkey and China, an Azerbaijani scholar has suggested.
    And while the Soviet dictator did not succeed in doing so in any of these cases, largely because of Stalin’s dependence on the West after Hitler invaded his former ally in June 1941 and because of Western opposition in each, the existence of these plans demolishes the arguments of those who insist that the pact was only a defensive rather than also an offensive accord.
    In an analysis of recent research on these questions posted on the 1news.az site over the weekend, Jeyhun Najafov calls attention to an aspect of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact that has attracted little attention during this year’s debate on the 70th anniversary of the accord between Hitler and Stalin (1news.az/analytics/20090829104314684.html).
    As almost all sides in that debate concede, the secret protocol attached to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact put part of Poland, Finland, Bessarabia, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania in Moscow’s sphere of influence, opening the way for the Soviet Union to expand it borders to the West.
    Stalin’s supporters argue that this was a defensive maneuver, designed to protect the Soviet Union from what the Soviet dictator assumed would be an eventual German attack on the USSR, while critics of Stalin argue that the Soviet agreement with the Nazis was simply about the territorial aggrandizement of Stalin’s empire.
    Research conducted by Dzhakhangir Nadzhafov, a scholar at the Moscow Institute of General History, clearly shows that Stalin’s critics have the better argument, given that documents he published in Moscow’s “Voprosy istorii” show that Stalin planned to use the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact as “a model” for annexing other neighboring regions.
    Not surprisingly, Nadzhafov focused on Stalin’s plans to annex the northern regions of Iran, the population of which was and remains predominantly ethnically Azerbaijani, but he also explored the Soviet dictator’s plans to annex the Xinjiang Region of China and some of the eastern districts of Turkey.
    In 1941, Nadzhafov wrote, Mirdzhafar Bagirov, the Communist Party boss of Azerbaijan, invoking Stalin, said that “in Iran it is necessary to undertake the tactic and strategy of the model of uniting Polish territories to Ukraine and Belorussia,” an indication that Moscow’s plans for annexing portions of Iran were “practically ready.”
    Additional evidence of the way in which Stalin viewed the secret protocols as a model concerns Xinjiang and the eastern portions of Turkey, Nadzhafov pointed out. “The Politburo planned to annex completely the Turkish districts of Kars, Ardahan and part of Avdina and divide the 26,500 square kilometers of territory between Armenia and Georgia.
    Moscow had also defined the exact dimension of the territory of Iran that would be united with the Azerbaijan SSR, so all three of the republics of the South Caucasus would have expanded significantly, Armenia by 80 percent, Georgia by eight percent, and Azerbaijan more than doubled.
    The Politburo was so committed to these territorial transfers and so certain that it they would take place that it had the foreign ministry work up the necessary documents and had decided on both the exact dates – the Iranian provinces were to be absorbed on November 7, 1941 – and the names of the Communist officials who would be assigned to these places.
    Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 put all these plans on hold. Stalin needed Western assistance, and much of it flowed through Iran. As a result, the British insisted that Moscow recognize the territorial integrity of that country, something the Soviet Union did in a trilateral agreement with the US and the United Kingdom in January 1942.
    But as Soviet forces moved westward and victory over Hitler seemed assumed, Moscow appears to have taken up the Southern Azerbaijan project once again, not only because many ethnic Azerbaijanis on both sides of the border were interested but because of the growing importance of oil, large amounts of which were located in this region.
    Toward that end, the Soviets created the Democratic Republic of Southern Azerbaijan, a regime backed by the present of Red Army troops. But after the end of World War II, those troops were withdrawn, and the Soviet-backed puppet government of Southern Azerbaijan collapsed.
    As Najafov noted in his article on Saturday, “certain [Azerbaijani] scholars connect the fall of the Democratic Republic of Southern Azerbaijan with what they see as a manifestation of the negative attitude toward Azerbaijan by Stalin, Beria, Mikoyan” and other Soviet leaders. But, the journalist says, such conclusions “do not have any basis in fact.”
    Instead, he writes, “the Western powers considered that Stalin and the Soviet leadership had received an enormous zone of influence in Europe and therefore must not be permitted in any way to expand into Central Asia.” Indeed, Najafov argues, “the West was united on this question.”
    “For Azerbaijanis,” he says, Southern Azerbaijan “was a question of the future of the nation. For the USSR, Iranian Azerbaijan was about the annexation of new territories, but for the West this was the expansion of communism.” And the West, possibly according to some accounts using the threat of a nuclear attack against the USSR, was not prepared to tolerate that.
    But however that may be – and this question is still a matter of dispute – the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact not only was the product of a far more aggressive Soviet policy than its defenders want to admit but also cast a larger and more ugly shadow than even the victims and opponents of the Hitler-Stalin accord had thought.

    http://windowoneurasia.blogspot.com/2009/08/window-on-eurasia-stalin-planned-to.html

  • Russia to stop Georgian border guards from detaining ships in ‘Abkhaz waters’

    Russia to stop Georgian border guards from detaining ships in ‘Abkhaz waters’

    RIA-Novosti

    Moscow, 28 August: The Russian FSB (Federal Security Service) Coastguard, together with the Abkhaz border guards, will ensure the security of vessels entering Abkhaz territorial waters against their detention by Georgia. In part this is being done as part of the preparations for the 2014 Olympic Games in Sochi, the head of the border guard department – deputy head of the Russian FSB Border Guard Service, Lt-Gen Yevgeniy Inchin, told RIA Novosti on Friday (28 August).

    Georgia views Abkhazia as part of its territory and regards the delivery of cargo to Abkhazia by sea without Tbilisi’s permission as breach of the country’s legislation. Since the start of 2009 Georgia’s coastguard has detained 23 vessels in Abkhaz waters for various violations. Four of them were detained for the violation of the rules for entering waters of “occupied territories”.

    “At sea they are quite aggressive. Georgia regards entry into Abkhazia’s territorial waters as basis for taking various measures against vessels sailing under third countries’ flags, including measures of judicial nature,” said Inchin.

    In his words, the agreement between the Russian Federation and Abkhazia on border protection envisages taking joint action to ensure security in Abkhazia’s territorial waters.

    Asked whether Russian FSB’s coastguard will deprive the Georgian side of the ability to detain vessels sailing to and from Abkhazia Inchin said: “The FSB’s border guard department for Abkhazia has a group of boats which will be addressing this task, that is to say ensuring the untouchability (of vessels).”

    “Trust me, they will be doing this in an efficient and productive manner, as the ‘factor of Sochi’ and the forthcoming Olympic Games is in this case the determining one. All of this will happen, in the near future. At present we need to create all the conditions for this,” the FSB general said.

    Abkhaz border guards too will have border guard boats. They will be addressing the tasks relating to ensuring security in the water zone together with their colleagues from Russia, he added.

    “The tasks aren’t easy, but we will fulfil them,” he said. (Passage omitted: RIA recalls recent detention)

    (Interfax news agency quoted the head of the border guard squad of Abkhazia’s state security service, Zurab Marghania, as saying: “At present the Russian and Abkhaz border services are drawing up a joint action plan for the prevention of the Georgian border guards’ pirate-like actions in the Black Sea.”)