Russia has been rolling out the humanitarian lingo to justify its ongoing proxy war with Ukraine. It has invoked the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) doctrine to carry out incursions to protect ethnic Russians in Crimea and other parts of Ukraine. It has dubbed its forces there as “peacekeepers” to give them the saintly halo of impartiality. (Though, as U.S. Ambassador to the UN Samantha Power put it, A Russian peacekeeper in Ukraine is an oxymoron.) Moscow has sent in a convoy of aid, which drew suspicions from Kiev it was a ruse for smuggling arms to pro-Russia rebels, and pledged future such convoys. This kind of death by a thousand “humanitarian” cuts is not unprecedented: the period leading up to Russia’s 2008 war with Georgia had an eerily similar feel.

Then, as now, Russia has wrapped itself in lofty-sounding legalese, as if the Kremlin were a branch of Human Rights Watch. Ahead of its 2008 war with Georgia, Russia had deployed over 2,000 peacekeepers to Abkhazia, just within the 3,000 ceiling mandated by a 1994 CIS agreement. It issued South Ossetians Russian passports, thus providing Moscow the ability to invoke R2P norms to protect its civilians under attack (never mind that South Ossetia was a sovereign part of Georgia). Invoking R2P, of course, is not a blank check, as it still requires Security Council authorization to use force. In early 2008, Georgia applied but was denied a Membership Action Plan (MAP) for NATO in Bucharest. A few months later, a Russian MIG-29 shot down an unmanned aerial vehicle, prompting a rapid buildup of armed forces and military exercises on both sides of the border. “The scene was now set for war,” wrote Andrei Illarionov, a former economic adviser to Putin. “Now all that was necessary was the spark to start it.” When war finally broke out, the Kremlin justified it as a humanitarian intervention to prevent a genocide of Ossetians – a misnomer that echoes France’s “pacification” of Algeria.

Behind Russia’s humanitarian facade lies a cold and calculated realpolitik.

Lessons for Ukraine

The buildup to Russia’s brief war in Georgia’s holds several important lessons for Ukraine. First, Russia has been clever in not providing Ukraine, or its Western benefactors, with any casus belli or action-forcing event to trigger too much escalation. At the same time, it is slowly trying to undermine Kievs sovereign grip on the east and thereby create new facts on the ground, as it were. A similar ploy existed in Abkhazia and South Ossetia before 2008. There have been a series of indirect “incidents” between Ukrainian and Russian forces, any of which could be the final spark, not least of which was the downing of a civilian airliner earlier this summer allegedly by pro-Russia forces. A number of Ukrainian military aircrafts have been shot down. Similar shootouts between Georgian and South Ossetian forces in 2008 were what offered the Russians, and Georgians to some extent, a pretext to escalate the level of violence. Unlike Georgia, Ukraine should be wary of engaging Russian forces directly, thereby giving Moscow an excuse to “defend” its fellow Russians with greater force. This would set off what former Ambassador Michael McFaul described as “spiral” dynamics, whereby both sides would prefer peace, but because of saving face, they may be forced to escalate, thus precipitating a larger crisis.

If such a spark occurs and there is a spiral of hostilities that include shows of force, the West needs to provide both sides with face-saving ways to deescalate tensions and walk back bellicose rhetoric. What might make Ukraine feel more emboldened to engage Russian forces would be reassurances by NATO or Washington that it would be protected in the event of larger hostilities with Russia, or even unclear signals of its intention. Maybe the most important thing the West can offer Kiev, as the Georgia case highlights, is clear signals on this front. Mixed signals are a doomsday machine (Arguably the unclear messages given to Tbilisi created a kind of moral hazard). It is important, moreover, that the West simultaneously and publicly provide robust assurances to Ukraine, because any moves that project weakness – or that it is turning its back on Kiev — could also be destabilizing as it could invite even greater provocations by the Kremlin. The worst outcome