“We had no prisoners. Our side did not take prisoners — they were shot.”

Giorgi Baramidze’s account of the early stages of the 1992–93 Georgian–Abkhaz war raises questions that deserve precise answers. Who was killed? Where? By whose orders? What became of their remains?

The Georgian–Abkhaz conflict cannot be understood through Russian–Georgian rivalry alone; its roots lie in a much older dispute over history, sovereignty and political legitimacy.

There is a persistent habit in international discussions of Abkhazia: begin with Russia.

Once that happens, the rest of the story almost writes itself. Abkhazia becomes a Russian instrument, Georgia becomes the victim of Russian expansion, and the Georgian–Abkhaz conflict is reduced to another chapter in the long confrontation between Moscow and Tbilisi.

The problem is not simply that this account is incomplete.

It begins the story in the wrong place.

Some conflicts are misremembered by accident. Others are misremembered because the simpler version is more useful. The war of 1992–1993 in Abkhazia belongs to the second category. What follows is an attempt to set aside the convenient shortcuts and look at the conflict as the Abkhazians themselves understood it: a struggle, finally, over the right to exist.

There is a particular violence in being remembered incorrectly. For the Abkhaz people, the war of 1992 and 1993 has suffered precisely this fate, refracted through interpretative frames so reductive that they obscure almost everything that matters. The conflict is routinely catalogued as an eruption of primal ethnic hatred, a separatist rebellion against a fledgling democracy, or, most conveniently of all, a proxy war engineered by Moscow against a vulnerable Tbilisi. Each of these frames has the merit of simplicity. None of them survives sustained scrutiny.

America’s closest allies are adjusting to a world in which Washington is no longer a stabilising force. The consequences are reshaping the meaning of the Western alliance itself.

For more than three-quarters of a century, the Western alliance has rested on an assumption so deeply embedded it rarely needed restating: whatever its internal frictions, the United States would not turn on its closest partners. Canada and Britain, bound to Washington by war, intelligence, trade and habit, were not merely allies but extensions of American power. That assumption is now breaking down at speed.