29. Vladimir Socor, “The Goals Behind Moscow’s Proxy Offensive in South Ossetia,” Eurasia Daily Monitor 5, no. 152 (August 8, 2008).
30. Neil Buckley, “Russia Accused of Annexation Attempt,” The Financial Times (April 17, 2008).
31. Buckley, “Russia Accused of Annexation Attempt.”
32. Andrey Illarionov provided a small list of Russians in the government of South Ossetia. They included lieutenant-general Anatoly Barankevich, minister of defense from July 6, 2004, to December 10, 2006; Anatoly Yarovoy, FSB major-general, chairman of the KGB in South Ossetia from January 17, 2005, to March 2, 2006; Mikhail Mindzayev, FSB lieutenant-general, minister of the interior of South Ossetia from April 26, 2005, to August 18, 2008; Andrey Laptev, lieutenant-general, minister of defense of South Ossetia from December 11, 2006, to February 28, 2008; Aslanbek Bulatsev, FSB colonel, prime minister of South Ossetia since October 31, 2008 (Illarionov, “The Russian Leadership’s Preparation for War, 1999–2008,” 81–82).
33. Alexander Golts, “Opyat Kavkazskaya Voyna,” Ezhednevnyy Zhurnal (August 9, 2008).
34. Illarionov, “The Russian Leadership’s Preparation for War, 1999–2008,” 68.
35. Mart Laar, “Echoes of the 1930s in Russia’s Sweeping Annexation,” Financial Times (April 17, 2008).
36. “Georgia and Russia: Clashing over Abkhazia,” 4.
37. Cf. “Kommentary Departamenta informatsii i pechati MID Rossii v svyazi s voprosami SMI otnositelno intsidenta s gruzinskim bespilotnym samoletom 20 aprelya 2008 goda” (Comment of the Information and Press Department of the Foreign Ministry of Russia concerning questions from the media on the incident with the Georgian drone on April 20, 2008). Website of the Russian Foreign Ministry.
38. Yuliya Latynina, “200 km. tankov. O rossiysko: gruzinskoy voyne” (Two Hundred Kilometres of Tanks. On the Russian-Georgian War), Ezhednevnyy Zhurnal (November 19, 2008), 7.
39. Cf. Neil Buckley and Roman Olearchyk, “UN Says Moscow Shot Georgian Drone,” The Financial Times (May 27, 2008). The Russian attack also endangered the civil aviation. According to the UN investigators the interception “took place very close to, or even inside an international airway, at a time where civilian aircraft were flying.”
40. Pavel Felgenhauer, “Saakashvili Wants to Get to Moscow, While Russian Troops Are in Abkhazia Already,” Novaya Gazeta (May 20, 2008). These plans for an ethnically cleansed “buffer zone” had, at that time, certainly already been discussed with Shamba’s Kremlin bosses. The plans would be executed during the August war.
41. Felgenhauer, “Saakashvili Wants to Get to Moscow, While Russian Troops Are in Abkhazia Already.”
42. “NATO calls on Russia to withdraw railway troops from Georgia,” International Herald Tribune (June 3, 2008).
43. “Saakashvili Calls Security Council to Decide on Abkhazia,” Nevtegaz.ru Novosti (June 3, 2008). The journalist of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung who visited Abkhazia in June 2008 repeated, uncritically, the vocabulary used by the Russian side to justify the entry of these troops, calling them “unarmed pioneers” (unbewaffnete Pioniere), comparing this Russian army battalion of engineers and technicians with a group of idealistic boy scouts. (Cf. Hosp, “Leise Hoffnung an der Roten Riviera.”)
44. “Tbilisi Condemns Russian ’Railway Troops’ in Abkhazia,” Civil Georgia (May 31, 2008). http://www.civil.ge/eng/_print.php?id=18445.
45. Socor, “The Goals Behind Moscow’s Proxy Offensive in South Ossetia.”
46. “Rossiya stoit na grani bolshoy Kavkazkoy voyny,” Forum.msk.ru (July 5, 2008). http://forum-msk.org/print.html?id=496351.
47. “Rossiya stoit na grani bolshoy Kavkazkoy voyny.”
48. “58-ay armiya RF gotova voyti v Tskhinvali,” Gruziya Online (August 3, 2008).http://www.apsny.ge/news/1217792861.php.
49. “58-ay armiya RF gotova voyti v Tskhinvali.”
50. Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on the Conflict in Georgia, 238.
Chapter 14
The War with Georgia, Part II
Six Events Announcing the Kremlin’s
Preparation for War
Different authors have tried to reconstruct the chain of events leading to the outbreak of war. In this chain of events there are at least six events that should be considered. They are, separately, and taken together, a clear indication of Russia’s preparations for war. These events are as follows:
A cyber war, launched by Russian servers before the outbreak of the hostilities, paralyzing Georgian government websites. This cyber war must have been prepared well in advance.
The huge Kavkaz-2008 military exercise conducted near the Georgian border just before the outbreak of the war.
The evacuation of the population of the South Ossetian capital Tskhinvali before the war.
The surprising presence of a huge group of about fifty Russian journalists from the most important Russian press media and TV stations in Tskhinvali two days before the war began.
The active preparation for participation in the war by Cossack militias from Russia before the outbreak of war.
The incursion of regular Russian troops into South Ossetia before the outbreak of war.
According to Wesley K. Clark and Peter L. Levin, “Russia has already perpetrated denial-of-service attacks against entire countries, including Estonia, in the spring of 2007—an attack that blocked the Web sites of several banks and the prime minister’s Web site—and Georgia, during the war of August 2008. In fact, shortly before the violence erupted, Georgia’s government claimed that a number of state computers had been commandeered by Russian hackers and that the Georgian Ministry of Foreign Affairs had been forced to relocate its Web site to Blogger, a free service run by Google.”[1] In the case of Georgia this would mean that the Russian cyber war already started before the hostilities began.
The Russian 58th Army is Russia’s main military force in the North Caucasus. In the weeks before the invasion it conducted major exercises with the code name “Kavkaz-2008” (Caucasus 2008). These exercises took place in North Ossetia, just north of the Georgian border. It was a combined forces exercise in which the Russian air force and the Black Sea Fleet also took part. The official reason for the exercise was to improve the army’s preparedness to fight terrorism. However, “such a force was hardly of great utility in fighting terrorists in the mountains, but it was ideal for a conventional invasion of a neighbor. In fact, this exercise was a trial run for the invasion about to take place. . . . It was de facto a war game to invade Georgia.”[2] When, on August 2, the exercise officially ended, the troops did not return to their barracks, but remained deployed in the frontier region with Georgia. According to Andrey Illarionov, “the build-up culminated with the amassing of 80,000 regular troops and paramilitaries close to the Georgian border, at least 60,000 of which participated in the August war.”[3]
The evacuation of the population of Tskhinvali was already wholly completed before the outbreak of the hostilities. Up to four thousand South Ossetians had crossed the border to neighboring North Ossetia in the Russian Federation. This exodus, meticulously prepared and organized by the authorities, was not a collective summer holiday, as President Kokoity wanted to make out. It was a preventive measure in a war of which the South Ossetian authorities—including the minister of defense, the Russian General Vasily Lunev (who would soon become the commander-in-chief of the attacking Russian 58th Army), already knew that it was going to take place.
Said-Husein Tsarnaev, a journalist with the press agencies RIA Novosti and Reuters, arrived in Tskhinvali on August 4. He was very surprised when he entered the lobby of his hotel in this small provincial town in an isolated and desolate region, far from Moscow, and found the lobby invaded by a crowd of Russian journalists. “We’ve arrived in Tskhinvali three days prior to the attack on the city . . .,” he wrote later, “we’ve got accommodation in the hotel ‘Alan.’ At once, I’ve noticed about fifty journalists of leading TV channels and newspapers gathered in the
hotel. I have experience with two Chechen campaigns and such a crowd of colleagues at the headquarters of peacekeeping forces I took as a disturbing signal.”[4] It was, indeed, a disturbing signal. What were these journalists—many of whom were celebrated Russian star reporters—doing in Tskhinvali, an outpost in the Caucasus, in the first days of August 2008? Who brought them there? What for? And why had the Russian government closed Tskhinvali to non-Russian reporters (except two journalists from Ukraine)? Russian websites have since published lists of the journalists’ names.[5] And, indeed, the fine fleur of the Russian media was present. The journalists represented almost every prominent paper, magazine, and news agency, including Izvestia, Novoe Vremya, Moskovskiy Komsomolets, Nezavisimaya Gazeta, Regnum, ITAR-TASS, and RIA Novosti, not to forget the most important Russian television channels: NTV, REN TV, TVTS, TV Channel “Rossiya,” TV Channel “Mir,” as well as the First and the Fifth TV Channel. Some of the journalists had already arrived on August 2, others on August 5 and 6. Why were they there, in Tskhinvali, a deserted ghost town left by its inhabitants for “holidays” in the Russian Federation? The journalists were obviously waiting for something to happen. They were waiting for what?
On August 6—two days before the start of the hostilities—the pro-Kremlin paper Nezavisimaya Gazeta published an article with the title “Don Cossacks Prepare to Defend the People of South Ossetia against Georgian Aggression.”[6] The Cossacks are fighters who historically played an important role in defending the frontiers of the Russian empire. After having been repressed by the communists, their hosts (locally organized groups) made a glorious comeback in the Russian Federation, and they have fought as mercenaries in many conflicts in the post-Soviet states. In the article in the Nezavisimaya Gazeta the ataman (leader) of the Don Cossacks announced that Cossack fighters were preparing to go to South Ossetia. He said that “Cossacks from the whole of Southern Russia were united in their effort to help the unrecognized republic.”[7] The question is why the Cossack militias were actively preparing to fight in South Ossetia on August 6, yet the war that broke out one day later was represented by the Kremlin as a complete surprise.
The sixth event, however, was the most significant. It was the entry of regular Russian troops into Georgia through the Roki tunnel. Russian troop movements must already have started on August 6, the day before the hostilities began. The Georgian government had intercepted cell-phone conversations between South Ossetian border guards saying that Russian border guards had taken over the control of the Roki tunnel at the Georgian side and that a Russian military column had passed through at about four o’clock in the morning. How many troops had gone through was not clear. The name of a Russian colonel who was in charge was mentioned. He commanded a unit of the 58th Army that was not authorized to be in Georgia. The Georgian peacekeeping commander in South Ossetia, Brigadier General Mamuka Kurashvili, phoned the Russian supreme commander of the mixed (Russian-Georgian) peacekeeping forces, Major General Marat Kulakhmetov, asking for an explanation. Kulakhmetov promised to call back, but did not do so. Thereupon President Saakashvili sent an envoy, Temuri Yakobashvili, to Tskhinvali to talk to a Russian diplomat, Yury Popov. Popov, however, did not show up. The reason he later gave was that his car had a flat tire and he didn’t have a spare one. The only Russian official Yakobashvili was able to meet in a deserted Tskhinvali was General Kulakhmetov. The Russian general proposed that Georgia declare a unilateral ceasefire. During the conversation he told Yakobashvili that he was fed up with the Ossetian separatists, who, according to him, had become uncontrollable, apparently suggesting that the Russians would eventually take a neutral stance if Tbilisi were to attack the separatists.[8]
A Slow-Motion Annexation?
The Georgians did not fall in this trap. They followed Kulakhmetov’s advice and declared a unilateral ceasefire on August 7 at 6:40 p.m. The only response was an intensified shelling from 8:30 p.m. of the Georgian villages north of Tskhinvali by South Ossetian militias.[9] At 10:30 p.m. two Georgian peacekeepers were killed and six wounded. Saakashvili received new intelligence reports, transmitted by an American satellite, that a column of 150 Russian tanks had entered the Roki tunnel.[10] Saakashvili found himself confronted by a situation in which Russian troops and heavy equipment were being brought illegally into South Ossetia, gradually building up enough military potential for a direct attack on Georgia. Saakashvili’s efforts to call President Medvedev had no success. On the evening of August 7 Saakashvili was facing a dilemma: allow Russia’s military infiltration of Russia into South Ossetia to continue, and thereby permitting Russia to complete a huge military buildup, and enabling it to crush the Georgian army, or to act.
Ronald D. Asmus has described the extremely stressful and precarious situation in which the Georgian leadership found itself in the late hours of August 7, 2008. “They all believed Georgia was being invaded in a kind of slow-motion, incremental way.”[11] “Moscow,” he wrote, “was trying to de facto annex these two disputed enclaves bit by bit in slow motion—testing to see if the West would protest and daring Tbilisi to try to stop them.”[12] It was also clear that Moscow would have no difficulty in finding an adequate casus belli to invade the territory of Georgia proper in order to reach its ultimate goal: to topple Saakashvili and bring about a regime change in Tbilisi. Waiting for the Russian troops to choose the right moment for attack meant that Georgia would leave the initiative to the other side. Considering the great inequality in manpower and military equipment[13] it would be an easy walkover for the Russians with disastrous consequences for Georgia. Confronted with the continuing incursion by Russian forces into South Ossetia and the intensified shelling of the Georgian villages north of Tskhinvali, at 11:30 p.m. Saakashvili ordered his troops to enter South Ossetia in order to occupy Tskhinvali and stop the advance of the Russian troops. “Did Saakashvili fall into a trap?” asked Svante Cornell and S. Frederick Starr.[14] They concluded: “Maybe so, but . . . even if he had not, a pretext would have been found to proceed with the campaign as it had been planned.”[15] Indeed, Saakashvili’s decision to attack was a case of a desperate, last minute forward defense, the ultimate trump card Georgia had at its disposal to avoid of being overrun by its huge neighbor. By blocking or preventing a Russian assault, the Georgian leadership—fully aware of the fact that Georgia could never win the war—hoped to win time, thereby enabling the United States and the EU to intervene and find a diplomatic solution.
Some commentators have stressed the fact that the Georgians did not mention the presence of Russian troops in South Ossetia before August 8. This was the case, for instance, with Eric Fournier, the French ambassador in Tbilisi. However, Jonathan Littell brought more clarity in this case when he visited Georgia in October 2008.
Nobody has talked publicly about Russian tanks before 8 August. But, in private, it is more complicated: whilst the Ambassador of France in Tbilisi categorically affirms: “The Georgians have never called their European allies to inform them: ‘The Russians are attacking us,’ Matthew Byrza, a high American diplomat in charge of the Georgian dossier since the start of the Bush administration, explains to me: That the Georgians were more open with us than with the Europeans is normal because of our privileged relationship. Eka Tkechelachvili, their Minister of Foreign Affairs, has called me at 11.30h [Tbilisi time] and said to me: ‘The Russians are entering into South Ossetia with tanks and more than 1,000 men, we have no choice, we are ending the ceasefire. . . .’ The Georgians were convinced that that really happened.”[16]
It is self-evident that the ambassador of France, one of the leading countries that some months earlier blocked Georgia’s Membership Action Plan for NATO, was not the first one on the list to be called by Saakashvili on that fateful evening.
The Central Question: Did Russian Troops Enter South Ossetia Before the War?
The Kremlin has always denied that Russian troops entered South Ossetia before the war. However, despite these denials there are many indications to the contrary th
at cast doubt on the Kremlin’s official version and vindicate the Georgian version. On August 7, for instance, one day before the war started, the Abkhaz separatist leader Sergey Bagapsh appeared on the Russian TV channel Rossiya, declaring: “I have spoken to the President of South Ossetia. It [the situation] has more or less stabilized now. A battalion from the North Caucasus District has entered the area.”[17] This declaration, confirming the presence of Russian troops in South Ossetia before the war, was not the only one. On August 15, 2008, the regional Russian paper Permskie Novosti published an article with the title “Soldiers from Perm Were in the Epicentre of the War.” In this article is reproduced a telephone call by a soldier of the 58th Army, which had invaded Georgia. The soldier told his parents: “We have been there [in South Ossetia] since August 7. Yeah, our whole 58th Army.”[18] In the article was also mentioned that on August 7 the mobile phones of the soldiers were “muted.”[19] Another indication of the early entry of Russian troops into South Ossetia could be found in an article in Krasnaya Zvezda (The Red Star), the paper of the Russian army, published on September 11, 2008. In this article army Captain Denis Sidristiy, who received the Order for Courage for his personal heroism during the war, gave the following account of the events: “We were on exercise [Kavkaz-2008]. Relatively not far from the capital of South Ossetia. . . . After the planned exercises we remained in the camp, but on August 7 came the order to go to Tskhinvali.”[20] Sidristiy confirmed that he witnessed during the night of August 7 to 8 the shelling of Tskhinvali by the Georgian army, which would only have been possible after crossing the high Caucasus mountains and when he was already inside South Ossetia. When the article was cited by other media,[21] the interview disappeared suddenly from the website to reappear again with editorial changes that specified the times of the day. The order to march to South Ossetia came now “on 7 August in the night” and captain Sidristiy saw the shelling of Tskhinvali “on 8 August in the morning.”[22] However, these sudden changes to the captain’s memory might have been too blatant: soon afterward the editor of the Krasnaya Zvezda decided to remove the article altogether.[23]
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