The Restless Wave: Good Times, Just Causes, Great Fights, and Other Appreciations

by John McCain

The Russian separatists in Abkhazia and South Ossetia had nearly severed the regions from Georgia. A quarter million Georgians had fled Abkhazia in 1993, and about a tenth that number had to leave South Ossetia in the same period. Territory in both regions was effectively ruled by Russia. The Putin cult of personality, that bare-chested, give-the-finger-to-the-West machismo he advertises to Russians living in Russia and abroad, that the West sneered at for years, was evident early on in those breakaway Georgian regions. On a congressional delegation trip to Georgia a few years after that first visit, when Saakashvili was president but before Russia invaded Georgia in 2008, we entered South Ossetia without our Georgian hosts, who were forbidden to enter. Although it was sovereign Georgian territory, it had a border crossing and border guards and a gregarious Russian puppet running the place, who handed each of us huge floral arrangements. We were taken to a nearby farmhouse where we met with a bunch of Russian colonels. The first sight that greeted us after our bus “crossed the border” was an immense billboard with a smiling Vladimir Putin looking down on us, and written in Russian above him “Our President.”