A year ago this Friday Russia and Georgia went to war. By the standards of modern warfare it was a little war. It lasted five days. Casualties were modest. It nevertheless sparked the greatest European security crisis since Slobodan Milosevic unleashed the dogs of ethnic cleansing in the Balkans in the 1990s. Moscow invaded a neighbour for the first time since the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. It broke the cardinal rule of post-cold war European security that borders in Europe should never be changed by force of arms. It showed an ugly neo-imperial side of its policy that many in the west had hoped was part of the past.

The origins of this war were not rooted in competition over territory or the status of the separatist provinces of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. This war was fought to prevent Georgia from going west; and these conflicts were hijacked as part of a broader strategy to undercut Tbilisi’s western aspirations. Moscow feared the impact that Georgia’s pro-western democratic experiment could, if successful, have in the southern Caucasus and potentially across the border in Russia.