The recent doubling of the price of gas Russia sells to Georgia to heat and illuminate its five million citizens is the latest in a long line of tit-for-tat actions and reactions between the two. The current stage in the crisis was provoked by the humiliating and very public arrest of four Russian intelligence officers in Georgia in late September but, three years since the ‘rose revolution’, Georgia’s western tilt underpins everything.
Georgia and Russia: Feeling the Heat
The stand-off between Russia and Georgia is nothing less than the worst relationship between Russia and any other former Soviet state – any state at all in fact – since the fall of Communism in 1991. A small cold war is heating up. And the heat matters because of Georgia’s tilt to the west and the implications for managing Moscow.
