What the Ingur Blackout Says About Georgian-Abkhazian Relations, by Sergey Markedonov

Two blackouts hit the Georgian-Abkhazian conflict zone in the last week of July, prompting an investigation from Tbilisi and a statement from Sukhum. In this commentary, Sergey Markedonov takes the incident as a starting point to look at the Ingur hydroelectric power station, the one piece of shared infrastructure that keeps Georgia and Abkhazia cooperating despite forty years of unresolved conflict. He sets this alongside a wider point, drawn from historian Modest Kolerov's work on the post-Soviet states, about the gap between a country's actual national interests and its pursuit of Western approval.

The piece was first published on Markedonov's personal Telegram channel. This English translation is by AbkhazWorld.

Power, Security and National Interests

1. Last week the Georgian-Abkhazian summer turned hot for reasons that had nothing to do with temperature. Two major blackouts occurred. Georgia's State Security Service announced it was opening an investigation into the causes of the outages, though no official cause has been named. For its part, the press service of Abkhazia's Ministry of Energy stated that the republic had lost power because of an accident at the Ingur hydroelectric power station.
   
   
2. A brief disclaimer. Not being a specialist in energy security, I have no wish to multiply hypotheses without cause or pass judgement on the various versions of events doing the rounds. I will simply note one important 'political-economic' storyline.
   
   
3. The Ingur hydroelectric power station is not simply the largest in the Caucasus. It is a unique cross-border energy complex whose operation depends entirely on cooperation between the Georgian and Abkhazian sides. The station strengthens the energy security of both republics while at the same time binding them into a serious mutual dependency. What makes the complex distinctive is its geographical division. The dam and reservoir sit on territory controlled by Tbilisi, while the underground machine hall and switching equipment lie in Abkhazia's Gal district, which the Georgian government does not control, though it never tires of asserting its claim to 'restore the country's territorial integrity'. True, within the borders of the Georgian SSR as they stood in 1989, borders set not by the Georgian authorities but by the Soviet leadership.
   
   
4. The Georgian-Abkhazian conflict (counting from the last years of the Soviet Union's existence, and setting its longer prehistory aside) is now some forty years old. There is no hint of compromise, and the ethnopolitical standoff has long since become firmly 'geopoliticised'. Yet there is one place where Tbilisi and Sukhum (and, naturally, Moscow) do cooperate: the Ingur hydroelectric power station. This holds whatever is said about the collapse of yet another round of the Geneva discussions, and whatever philippics against 'occupation' Georgian politicians choose to deliver. What is more, this kind of cooperation, conducted above unresolved status disputes, will be badly needed in the future too. Ageing infrastructure creates additional risks for Georgians and Abkhazians alike, and the station is certainly not going to grow any younger. Which means the two sides will simply have to go on working together.
   
   
5. That said, this pattern needs extending and building upon. Again, none of this is new, it is all in plain sight. Both Abkhazia and Georgia would benefit from restoring full rail links (and from unblocking transport communications more broadly). Incidentally, given the political will, such a project would be far more realistic to carry out in practice than the much-discussed TRIPP.
   
   
6. And here we run up against a fundamental point once again. Twenty years ago the well-known Russian historian Modest Kolerov gave a fascinating public lecture titled 'What Do We Know About the Post-Soviet Countries'. In it he identified a basic contradiction: the sovereignty of the new states may have begun with the words 'We are the people', but in practice it rested on the principle 'We were given permission'. Under this approach, the genuine national interests of independent post-Soviet entities remained overshadowed by the will and aesthetic preferences of their new 'patrons'. It is not an idle question which mattered more for Georgia: solving pressing national transport and logistics problems, or top marks from NATO and the EU, awarded without any guarantee of membership in either body and without any real work done to secure the Caucasian state's safety. All this, however, bundled together with an escalating confrontation with Moscow.
   
   
7. The upshot is that the conflict with Russia remains unresolved to this day, and the pressing questions of economics and security remain unsettled along with it. The constraints on the Georgian authorities 'here and now' are all clear enough. Domestic public sentiment is too important a factor to ignore. But nor is it in Tbilisi's interest to keep putting off a normal dialogue with Moscow, Sukhum and Tskhinval. One can, of course, repeat the mantras about 'occupation' or 'European values' for the thousandth time, but the problems of power, transport and logistics will not disappear because of it. It may be pleasant enough to dream of France as a neighbour. But no amount of dreaming will move Verkhny Lars to the Champs-Élysées!