Maurizio Donini The Current Situation: Permanent Occupation, “Borderisation”, and the EUMM Presence In the wake of the ceasefire agreement negotiated on behalf of the EU by then French President Nicolas Sarkozy, Russia withdrew its invading troops from undisputed Georgian territory, but went on to unilaterally recognise the independence of Abkhazia and South Ossetia (26 August 2008). Moscow converted the former interposition forces into permanent Russian army military bases (the 4th and 7th military bases), deploying thousands of troops along with Federal Security Service (FSB) border guard units along the Administrative Boundary Lines (ABL). For this reason, Tbilisi’s legislation (the 2008 Law on Occupied Territories) and international law unambiguously classify both regions as Georgian territories under temporary occupation by the Russian Federation. ...

Maurizio Donini The Casus Belli of Abkhazia and South Ossetia In the chaos of the Soviet Union’s dissolution and the birth of the Republic of Georgia, the status of the autonomous regions inherited from the Soviet legal order deteriorated rapidly: the autonomous oblast of South Ossetia and the Abkhaz Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (ASSR) rose up in bloody separatist wars seeking to break away from Tbilisi, while the third autonomous republic, Adjara, became a de facto local fiefdom outside central authority until its peaceful reintegration in 2004. Under the principle of uti possidetis juris (existing administrative boundaries become the international borders of the new state), however, both Abkhazia and South Ossetia remained an integral and inalienable part of Georgia’s sovereign territory. ...

Maurizio Donini On the eve of the Soviet Union’s collapse, Georgia was still officially a Soviet Socialist Republic (SSR) federated to the USSR, but increasingly resistant to Moscow’s central control. The definitive break came with the trauma of 9 April 1989, when Soviet special army troops bloodily suppressed a peaceful pro-independence demonstration in Tbilisi (21 dead, many of them women, killed with sapper’s spades and poisoned by asphyxiating gas). This massacre severed all psychological ties with Moscow, accelerated the nationalist momentum, and paved the way for the referendum and the full declaration of independence on 9 April 1991. ...

Maurizio Donini The disintegration of the Soviet Union triggered a series of autonomist and independence movements that led to the birth of new states, often at the end of bloody wars. There are also “frozen conflicts” — disputes marked by armed clashes that remain unresolved and periodically flare back up. For nearly thirty years, Nagorno-Karabakh was the archetype of this purgatory. When I first looked into this subject in 2020, the war had resumed with great violence: the flare-up that occurred between September and October of that year ended with a dramatic toll of roughly 5,000 dead and 30,000 displaced. At the time, Europe was culpably absent, paralysed by the urgency of Covid and oblivious to the rest of the world, while the United States seemed trapped by the isolationism of the Trump presidency and distracted by its own domestic elections. The Western vacuum was quickly filled by Vladimir Putin, who imposed a peace plan signed in Moscow and guaranteed by the deployment of 2,000 Russian troops. At the time, the prevailing view was that it was unlikely the Kremlin would withdraw those troops once the agreement’s five-year term expired. ...