By Clare Nuttall in Glasgow Long before Russia engineered the breakup of Ukraine by annexing Crimea and backing separatists in the east eight years ago and then invading earlier in 2022, it fundamentally weakened two more of the newly independent states in the post-Soviet space, Georgia and Moldova, by backing local separatists. That left the government Georgia with substantial parts of its territory outside its control as the separatists in Abkhazia and South Ossetia set up de facto states; the Transnistrians did the same in the eastern part of Moldova that borders Ukraine. Apart from the fiv…