FP: What about Azerbaijan, which has the Nagorno-Karabakh enclave? Should Azerbaijan worry about being next on Moscow’s hit list?

PG: Russian policy in this region is vastly more variegated than we assume. What Russia will do to promote its interests in Ukraine or Azerbaijan or Georgia are three different things.

For one thing, the Azerbaijanis have a lot more money than the Georgians do, and they’ve invested more in their military. Azerbaijan is far more concerned about being able to ship its oil across Georgian territory through the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline than almost anything else. Earlier in the week when that pipeline was not working, Azerbaijan was sending oil through Russia to Novorossiisk, which of course gave Russia a hold, and it was also sending oil south across Iran, an action I suspect a large number of American officials would have problems with.

What Moscow may do either in eastern Ukraine or especially in Crimea is very different than what it has done in Georgia—not only because Ukraine is a lot bigger. It’s really only the Americans who seem to think that all these countries are somehow branch offices. Russia has a very, very good set of experts who understand just how different these places are.

Now, the domestic reaction in Russia hasn’t gotten a lot of attention, but you’ve got people speaking out. You’ve had demonstrations against the war. You’ve got soldiers’ mothers’ committees going to court because the Russian Defense Ministry lied and said that there would be no draftees used in combat, which they were. Boris Nemtsov, the opposition leader, reportedly wrote on his blog that if Moscow continues on the path it is now, “Russia and Russians will suffer even more.”

FP: But this is a minority viewpoint, right?

PG: I’m not suggesting that if a vote were taken tomorrow, Russians would vote down what Putin and Medvedev have done. But it’s wrong to assume that every Russian thinks this was the greatest act of statecraft in the history of the world. There are a lot of people who don’t, and while I don’t think they set the weather, to ignore the role they play is a mistake.

I believe that one of the reasons the fighting stopped was not because there weren’t people in the defense ministry who thought it should go on for a bit longer, but because in the first two working days of the war, there was a total of some $8 billion net capital outflow from Russia. You’re talking about serious consequences for wealthy Russians, and they matter a whole lot more than the soldiers’ mothers’ committees or Boris Nemtsov or Garry Kasparov.

Because of this war, Russians are no longer going to be as welcome in foreign countries. We’re probably going to see the spread of what is an unfortunate thing: In Germany and France, Europeans are now choosing to go on trips to resorts that the tour operators promise are “Russian free.” In human terms, that’s ugly, but in collective terms that’s a source of enormous pressure.

Polls tell us that for many Russians, the single most important right they acquired after 1991 was the right to travel. If getting a visa becomes more difficult, Russians are going to have a harder time moving about. It’s going to be harder to get their children into elite international schools. There’s going to be less money around. So, there’s probably a constituency, and a pretty large one among an influential group of people, who are going to go to the Russian government and say, “You’re hitting us where it matters most: in our pocketbooks.” And that’s a source of influence that should not be discounted at all.

Paul A. Goble is a long-time specialist, at the Central Intelligence Agency and elsewhere, on the non-Russian peoples of Eurasia. Currently director of research and publications at the Azerbaijan Diplomatic Academy, he blogs at WindowonEurasia and for the New York Times.