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Foreign Press during and after Russian-Georgian War

October 6, 2008


Inspiration And Danger In Georgia
By Michael Gerson
Washington Post
Wednesday, August 20, 2008;

Daniel Fried: "Georgia badly miscalculated in this crisis. President Mikheil Saakashvili believed he could quickly gobble up his breakaway provinces, just as he did in Georgia's southwest four years ago. He is a hothead who acted against American advice. "

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From Green Light to Yellow
By Dan Froomkin
Special to washingtonpost.com
Wednesday, August 13, 2008; 1:03 PM

"Bush administration officials have been adamant in asserting that they warned the government in Tbilisi not to let Moscow provoke it into a fight -- and that they were surprised when their advice went unheeded. Right up until the hours before Georgia launched its attack late last week in South Ossetia, Washington's top envoy for the region, Assistant Secretary of State Daniel Fried, and other administration officials were warning the Georgians not to allow the conflict to escalate.

QUOTE
Julian E. Barnes and Peter Spiegel write, Los Angeles Times

"A senior U.S. official involved in Russia policymaking vehemently denied that the administration had sent mixed messages, arguing that although Saakashvili had long received strong support from the most senior American officials, Georgians were warned not to engage Russia militarily.

"'We have consistently, and on Thursday also, urged the Georgians not to move their forces in. We were unambiguous about it,' said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity when discussing private talks with the Georgians. 'Saakashvili had always told us he could not stand by while Georgian villages were being shelled, and we always knew this was a point of pressure. We always told him that he should not give in to the kind of provocations we knew the Russians were capable of.'

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U.S. Watched as a Squabble Turned Into a Showdown
Published: August 17, 2008

Whether they intended to build a military for fighting or deterrence is unclear. American officials said they repeatedly and bluntly told their Georgian counterparts that the Iraq mission should not be taken as a sign of American support, or as a prelude, for operations against the separatists.

American officials said that they had clearly told their Georgian counterparts that the plan had little chance of success, given Kremlin statements promising to protect the local population from Georgian “aggression” — and the fact of overwhelming Russian military force along the border.

On Aug. 6, the separatists fired on several Georgian villages, Georgian officials said. The Russian Defense Ministry and South Ossetian officials say that Georgians provoked the escalation by shelling Russian peacekeeping positions in the region’s capital of Tskhinvali, along with civilian areas.

The Georgians said the separatists stepped up their shelling. Foreign Minister Eka Tkeshelashvili of Georgia called Mr. Fried and told him that her country was under attack, and that Georgia had to protect its people. Mr. Fried, according to a senior administration official, told the Georgian not to go into South Ossetia. The Georgians moved in on Aug. 7.

QUOTE
Georgia and Russia Clash Over Separatist Regions
By Peter Finn
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, August 12, 2008;

Last week, Georgian forces launched a major offensive that captured the South Ossetian capital in an effort to reestablish central government control; Russian forces drove them out two days later.

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Georgia's Recklessness
TOOLBOX, Resize  » Links to this article
By Paul J. Saunders
Washington Post
Friday, August 15, 2008;
. What's clear, however, is that Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili ordered his country's military to assert his authority over South Ossetia by force. American officials should reflect on the implications of Saakashvili's behavior for U.S. policy toward Georgia, Russia and the region.

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The Risk of the Zinger
By David Ignatius
Washington Post
Wednesday, August 20, 2008;

In the aftermath of the Georgia war, many commentators have argued that the mercurial Saakashvili walked into a trap by launching an attack Aug. 7 on the South Ossetian capital of Tskhinvali -- providing the pretext for the brutal Russian response. That conclusion emerges from a meticulous reconstruction by The Post's Peter Finn.

It was especially wrong to give a volatile leader such as Saakashvili what he evidently imagined was an American blank check.

In the post-Cold War world, small countries often get into fights they can't finish -- hoping that big powers will come to their rescue

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We Are All Georgians"? Not So Fast
Sunday 17 August 2008, "Washington Post",
by: Michael Dobbs, The Washington Post On the night of Aug. 7 and into Aug. 8,

 Saakashvili ordered an artillery barrage against Tskhinvali and sent an armored column to occupy the town. He apparently hoped that Western support would protect Georgia from major Russian retaliation, even though Russian "peacekeepers" were almost certainly killed or wounded in the Georgian assault. It was a huge miscalculation.

 QUOTE
August 12, 2008 New York Times

But many here say he is headstrong and reckless, endangering the country’s security by rashly ordering an attack on the Russian enclave of South Ossetia on the eve of the Olympic Games in Beijing, and badly underestimating Russia’s determination to respond militarily. The critics say he has shown he is willing to put his ambition ahead of the best interests of his people.

Putin was in Beijing, Medvedev in a sanatorium on the Volga. There was merely one peacekeeper batallion in Tskhinvali without any heavy arms. They actually waited for 10 hours after the start of the bombardment, trying to get UN approval for intervening first, while in fact the planes of the 776th VVS brigade could have been there in maybe 30 minutes, around 0:30 am

 QUOTE
A Two-Sided Descent Into Full-Scale War
By Peter Finn
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, August 17, 2008;

"At 6, I gave the order to prepare everything, to go out from the bases," he said in an interview Aug. 14 at a Georgian position along the Tbilisi-Gori highway. Kezerashvili described the movement of armor, which included tanks, 122mm howitzers and 203mm self-propelled artillery, as a show of force designed to deter the Ossetians from continuing to barrage the Georgian troops' positions inside South Ossetia.

Western officials in and around South Ossetia also recorded the troop and armor movement, according to a Western diplomat who described in detail on-the-ground reports by monitors from the OSCE. The monitors recorded the movement of BM-21s in the late afternoon.

"On Thursday -- Thursday afternoon -- they noticed equipment and troops on the road, rolling to Karaleti," a Georgian village near Gori, the diplomat said. Kezerashvili said the BM-21s moved Thursday night.

At 7 p.m., with troops on the march, Saakashvili went on national television and declared a unilateral cease-fire. "We offer all of you partnership and friendship," he said to the South Ossetians. "We are ready for any sort of agreement in the interest of peace."

About 9 p.m., the Ossetians complained to Western monitors about the military traffic, according to a diplomat in Tbilisi.

Russian troops and armored units had been in Russian territory just north of South Ossetia for an annual summer military exercise. This year, they stayed in the area after completing the maneuvers. Russian intelligence officers were receiving reports about the movement of Georgian armor, and they interpreted it as the beginning of an offensive, according to a Russian official.

Saakashvili's televised call for a cease-fire, coinciding with the movement of so many troops and weapons, was perceived in Moscow as an attempt to buy time while Georgian forces positioned themselves for a major attack. Kezerashvili said that around the same time, Georgians were receiving intelligence reports suggesting that Russian troops were gearing up to move south through the Roki Tunnel. Russia denies any such muster.

In a series of phone calls, Saakashvili contacted Western and NATO leaders and diplomats. "I started to call frantically," he said in an interview with foreign journalists.

Bryza, the U.S. envoy, said: "Our response was, 'Don't get drawn into a trap. Don't confront the Russian military.' " Bryza said he was not told that Georgian armor was already moving toward the South Ossetian line and continued to do so even after Saakashvili declared a cease-fire.

The earlier movement of Russian troops into Abkhazia and around other terrain to the north was feeding sentiment among leaders in Tbilisi for a military response, Bryza said. "They felt they had to defend the honor of their nation and defend their villages. It was a very dangerous dynamic. That was part of an action-reaction, 'Guns of August' scenario that we tried to defuse."

According to Kezerashvili, on Thursday night, about three hours after Saakashvili's televised address, a new round of South Ossetian shells struck a Georgian peacekeeping position in the village of Sarabuki and an administration building in the village of Korta used by Sanakoyev, Tbilisi's South Ossetian ally.
This Story

Russia denies any such late-night bombardment. OSCE monitors in Tskhinvali also did not record any outgoing heavy artillery fire from the South Ossetian side at that time, according to a Western diplomat with access to the organization's on-the-ground reporting.

At 11 p.m., Saakashvili said, he received the first reports that Russian units were passing through the tunnel.


In calls to the U.S. administration, Georgian officials did not convey the scope of what was to come, Bryza said. "During these intense exchanges between the leadership here and me, when they said they were going to lift the cease-fire, we said, 'Don't put your forces in harm's way, because you cannot prevail,' «he said. "And the response was: 'We understand that. We are going to shell the road on which the Russians are approaching and try to keep them back.' That's what they said."

Georgia did not believe Russia would respond to its offensive in South Ossetia and was completely unprepared for the counter-attack, the deputy defence minister has admitted.

Batu Kutelia told the Financial Times that Georgia had made the decision to seize the South Ossetian capital of Tskhinvali despite the fact that its forces did not have enough anti-tank and air defences to protect themselves against the possibility of serious resistance.

"Unfortunately, we attached a low priority to this," he said, sitting at a desk with the flags of Georgia and Nato (to which Georgia does not belong) crossed behind him. "We did not prepare for this kind of eventuality."

Russian officials say 2,000 people died in Tskhinvali. That figure has been described as inflated by human rights groups. But there unquestionably was a large toll of civilian deaths and injuries, which has outraged Russia and shocked Georgia's Western allies.

"It's deplorable, simply deplorable, to fire on civilians like that, and illegal," said Matthew Bryza, the U.S. special envoy to the region, in an interview. "It's horrible."

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