Understanding Russia

Moscow's aggression is aimed not at Georgia's territory but at Europe's new democracies.

THERE WAS a telling juxtaposition of headlines from Russia yesterday. On one side you had President Dmitry Medvedev claiming a "sphere of influence" outside Russian borders and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov warning the West not to arm Georgia. On the other side, you had the murder of Magomed Yevloyev, a journalist whose independence had angered the government. He was arrested, shot in the head by police while riding in the back of a police car, and dumped by the side of the road.

This is a moment for clarity in thinking about Russia, which is forcibly occupying sizable chunks of a neighboring country and claiming it has every right to do so. Some in the West are tempted to agree. After all, the United States and its allies invaded Iraq and attacked Serbia; why can't Russia do the same to Georgia? Why can't it have a NAFTA of its own?

Here's why. The United States, Britain and other nations deposed the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein because he repeatedly violated his promises to the United Nations, after his earlier invasion of Kuwait, to rid himself of weapons of mass destruction and prove that he had done so. They invaded Serbia to protect the people of Kosovo from mass ethnic cleansing and destruction. In both cases, reasonable people can argue that it was wrong to act without U.N. authorization; they can make a case that the campaigns were unwise on many other grounds.

What they can't argue is that the allies were motivated by a desire for conquest or occupation; as the presidential campaign has shown, the American people can hardly wait to pull their troops out and leave Iraqis to manage their own affairs. NAFTA, meanwhile, was freely entered into by three democratically elected governments. If Canada wants out, the United States will not seize Ottawa.

Russia, on the other hand, is seeking to overthrow a democratically elected government precisely because that government does not want to be subjugated to Moscow. Mr. Medvedev's claim of a Georgian genocide, after his own government published casualty figures of 200 or so, is deliberately preposterous; he is mocking the very idea of humanitarian intervention. As Russia under president-turned-prime-minister Vladimir Putin has become less and less democratic, it has become increasingly aggressive toward neighboring democracies. The more democratic those neighbors become -- see Ukraine, Poland, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia -- the more hostile Russia becomes.

The brave Mr. Yevloyev, who returned to his hometown in the province of Ingushetia despite ample warning that Mr. Putin's thugs were waiting for him, may seem like a footnote to all this. But his death -- like the deaths of Anna Politkovskaya and so many other journalists and liberal politicians before him, like the death of the free press and open debate -- is at the heart of the story. Mr. Putin is turning Russia into something very like a fascist state, and its natural inclination will be to replicate itself abroad. "The Cold War was clearly about ideologies," Russia's ambassador to the European Union, Vladimir Chizhov, noted yesterday, and then claimed: "We are living in a different world today. There is no ground for talk about a second Cold War."

Judging by the E.U.'s feckless response yesterday to Russia's aggression, many European leaders still want to believe Mr. Chizhov. But what is happening in Georgia is very much about ideology, and the longer the Europeans pretend otherwise, the greater the damage they will have to contain.