Ideological Foundations of Russian Aggression in Georgia (August 2008)
Ideological Foundations of Russian Aggression in Georgia (August 2008)

Summary/Abstract: The August 2008 Russian military aggression against Georgia constitutes a landmark episode in the post-Soviet international order, marking the first open, large-scale use of the Russian Federation’s regular armed forces beyond national borders for offensive military purposes and resulting in the illegal occupation of parts of neighbouring country’s internationally recognised territory. Beyond its immediate military and diplomatic consequences, this aggression illuminated the deeper ideological and civilizational assumptions shaping contemporary Russian foreign policy.The article examines how Eurasianism, understood both as a long-standing intellectual tradition and as a modern political discourse, provided a framework through which Russian political elites interpreted Georgia, the Caucasus, and Russia’s regional role. Tracing the genealogy of Eurasian ist thought from classical authors to late-Soviet and post-Soviet reinterpretations, the article demonstrates how the Caucasus has been constructed as the “southern gate” of Eurasia and as a civilizational boundary zone whose loss, from a Russian perspective,would threaten the integrity of a Eurasian whole.Within this ideological imaginary, Georgia’s post-Soviet political transformation and European orientation were not perceived merely as a foreign policy divergence,but as a challenge to Russia’s civilizational self-conception. The article argues that the 2008 aggression translated Eurasian ist narratives into concrete political practice through discursive legitimation, spatial re-imagination, and symbolic restoration. In this sense, the Georgian case anticipated the later Russian annexation of Crimea (2014) and large-scale military intervention in Ukraine(from 2022), where civilizational geopolitics has similarly been mobilised to justify territorial domination.

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