Railroading Georgia

In the absence of serious Western resistance, Russia keeps provoking its democratic neighbor.

WHEN DMITRY Medvedev took office as Russian president last month, some hoped for a moderation of Moscow's increasingly belligerent foreign policy. The key testing point is the obscure region of Abkhazia, a province of Georgia that rebelled in the 1990s and has maintained de facto independence ever since with Russia's support. In April, responding to NATO's ambivalent answer to a request by Georgia for membership, outgoing President Vladimir Putin launched a series of provocations, first announcing closer relations between the Russian government and Abkhazia's separatist regime and then reinforcing a Russian military force in the province. On April 20, Georgia reported that a Russian warplane shot down a Georgian surveillance drone over Abkhazia, a charge confirmed by a U.N. investigation last week.

For a couple of weeks after the presidential transition, tensions eased; a meeting was scheduled for later this week between Mr. Medvedev and Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili. Yet now there has been another Russian provocation. Last weekend, Moscow dispatched several hundred more troops to Abkhazia, once again violating the terms of an international agreement giving it a peacekeeping role in the province. The new forces are supposedly "railway guards" who are meant to repair tracks connecting Abkhazia to Russia. Even if that is really their role, by deploying them, Russia is defying demands by the United States and the European Union that it reverse its plans to tighten bonds with Abkhazia.

Perhaps Mr. Medvedev doesn't want to de-escalate tensions with the West, after all -- or perhaps he's not really in charge of Russian foreign relations. In an interview published Saturday, Mr. Putin, who is now prime minister, told the French newspaper Le Monde that "I was personally occupied" with the plans for the railroad. Whatever the case, Western governments once again face the dilemma of what to do about a government that is baldly using force to violate the sovereignty of a democratic neighbor.

One option is diplomatic. Oddly, Mr. Putin also used the interview with Le Monde to sound a positive note about a recent Georgian peace plan for Abkhazia. The Bush administration has been trying to nurture new negotiations between Georgian and Abkhaz authorities with the support of an international coalition; a State Department official is in Moscow this week to pitch the idea. For that process to succeed or even begin, however, the West needs to take a firm and unified stand against Russia's provocations and demand a rollback of the recent troop deployments. The Bush administration must also keep pressing NATO to grant Georgia a membership action plan. If Russian aggression in Georgia continues unchecked, it is likely to escalate -- and spread to less obscure locations.