Putin got his small and victorious war. But it came in Georgia, not Chechnya. Russia's August 2008 war in Georgia proved immensely popular at home. With only a modest display of its military might, Russia seemingly achieved all its political objectives. It is ironic, then, that this triumph arrived only after Putin had stepped down as president.

Russia's war with Georgia remains mired in controversy centred on the question of who fired the first shot. The Georgians insist Russia conducted a campaign of destabilization aimed at a creeping annexation of Georgian territories in South Ossetia and Abkhazia. This campaign had its roots in the politics of Soviet collapse but accelerated under Putin. They argue that in the spring and summer of 2008, Russian-backed South Ossetian separatists attacked Georgian villages and security forces and that Russia deployed troops into the disputed territories to support them. Faced with the actualization of creeping annexation, they say, Georgia had little choice but to send its own troops into South Ossetia to hold the country together. The Kremlin claims it intervened to protect the South Ossetians from genocide only after Georgian forces attacked.

To understand what happened and why we need to trace two stories that conjoined. The first is a Georgian story: of its tumultuous separation from the Soviet Union, civil war and authoritarian government. The second is a Russian story: of how the Kremlin attempted to preserve what it called a “zone of privileged interest” in the former-Soviet space, a “liberal empire” to use the terminology employed by Anatoly Chubais, arguably the chief architect of the Yeltsin government's economic reform. Russia's first efforts to control the newly independent governments on its borders were chaotic, but over time they morphed into something more coherent and substantial, a core of Putin's political project. The two stories conjoined in 2003 when Georgia's “Rose Revolution” upended the rule of Eduard Shevardnadze (Gorbachev's long-serving foreign minister turned president of Georgia) and replaced it with that of Mikheil Saakashvili: a democrat (initially), reformist and nationalist. Saakashvili wanted to do two things: drag Georgia out of Russia's sphere and into closer partnership with the West and establish the state's authority over all the country's territory. That put Saakashvili on a collision course with Putin.