Alan Philps
Associate Editor - The National
United Arab Emirates
August 16. 2008
The Russian invasion of Georgia was not a spontaneous response to what
Moscow called “genocide” in South Ossetia but had been
planned in detail since April, according to Russia’s leading
independent defence analyst.
The plans all but ensured that fighting would break out before the end
of August, though the exact timing depended on how readily the Georgian
government could be provoked into starting it, Pavel Felgenhauer states
in a new analysis of the conflict.
It is generally agreed that the spark for the war was the Nato summit
meeting in Bucharest in April at which Georgia was promised eventual
membership of the western alliance, in the teeth of opposition from the
Russians.
According to Mr Felgenhauer, Vladimir Putin, who was president of
Russia at the time but now serves as prime minister, set in motion a
range of measures to support the two separatist territories in Georgia
– South Ossetia and Abkhazia – and prepare for a military
incursion.
By the start of August, Russian military engineers repaired the railway
linking Russia to Abkhazia, allowing the sudden appearance of tanks and
other heavy military equipment that was later used to attack and loot
the Georgian army base at Senaki, Mr Felgenhauer wrote in Novaya
Gazeta, one of the few Moscow newspapers outside the control of the
Kremlin.
In South Ossetia, as the Russian-backed separatists stepped up attacks
on Georgian police and military, the Russian army began to bring in
some heavy weapons to supplement their existing, lightly armed troops
who were there as internationally sanctioned peacekeepers.
Russia’s Black Sea fleet, as well as paratroopers and marines,
were mobilised in the area for summer exercises titled
“Kavkaz-2008”, which concluded on Aug 2.
The incursion had to start by the end of August, as the troops could
not be kept on full alert endlessly and the pass through the Caucasus
Mountains to South Ossetia would be snowed in by October, leaving only
the Roki tunnel, which is so narrow it is reduced to one-way traffic
when heavy military equipment is brought in.
Mr Felgenhauer said that, if the Georgian army was not provoked to
attack South Ossetia, then the Russians would ensure that fighting
broke out in Abkhazia, with the separatists trying to take the Kodori
Gorge, the last remaining territory still under Georgian government
control.
In the end, the Georgian president, Mikheil Saakashvili, responded to a
series of shooting incidents and roadside bombs with a full-scale
assault to recapture the South Ossetian capital, Tskhinvali.
Against this background, it is not surprising that Mr Putin, in Beijing
for the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games, responded speedily to
the Georgian assault with the accusation of “genocide”
– the charge Nato used to justify its assault on Serbia after the
Serbian army forced a mass exodus from the province of Kosovo in 1999.
The Russian preparations did not pass unnoticed to the Georgians, but
– to their increasing frustration – they found little
interest abroad in their warnings of an impending Russian assault.
In particular, European diplomats in Tbilisi, the Georgian capital,
were saying privately that the West was too busy with Iran, Iraq and
Afghanistan to pay attention to the possibility that the Georgian
conflicts, frozen for 16 years, might be about to heat up.
The Russians were encouraged when one of their MiG-29 fighters shot
down a unmanned Georgian spy plane on April 20, to only muted western
reaction. The Russian air force denied shooting down the drone, even
though live video showed it was clearly a MiG-29.
Speaking on Friday, Mr Saakashvili laid the blame for the conflict
squarely on the European countries that failed to speak out against the
Russian air force.
“No European country said anything about it,” he said
during a visit by Condoleezza Rice, the US secretary of state.
“So who invited the trouble here? Who invited this arrogance
here? Who invited these innocent deaths here? It is not only those
people who perpetrate them who are responsible, but also those people
who failed to stop them.”
Mr Saakashvili said the West had ignored the rebuilding of the railway
in Abkhazia, which was supposedly done for “humanitarian
reasons”.
Although Mr Saakashvili’s armed response to the preparations by
the Russians and the separatists is often seen in the West as a
disastrous miscalculation, it could have been a desperate attempt to
internationalise the separatist problem in the face of world
indifference.
He has certainly drawn international attention to his country, but few
would agree that the problems are any closer to resolution. The Russian
contention that the people of Abkhazia and South Ossetia never want to
live under Georgian rule seems irrefutable at the moment.
For their part, the Russians reject any suggestion that they planned
the invasion to prevent Georgia from joining Nato or to unseat Mr
Saakashvili, whose disagreements with Mr Putin have descended to a
bitter, personal level. For them it is a “peace
enforcement” operation.
An intriguing explanation of the war has emerged from Sergei Markov, a
commentator close to the Kremlin who is a member of the ruling party,
United Russia.
Mr Markov sees the war as a plot by Dick Cheney, US vice president, to
boost the chances of John McCain, the Republican contender in the
presidential election.
“The neoconservatives don’t give a damn about South Ossetia,” Mr Markov writes.
“Their aim in ordering Saakashvili to begin the war was to
provoke Russia to military action and then to unleash anti-Russian
hysteria and bring about a sort of new Cold War between the West and
Russia. McCain would ride this wave to victory in the presidential
elections.”
Mr McCain has indeed distinguished himself with his tough stance on
Georgia, saying: “We are all Georgians now.” But history
will probably put more weight on the Russian army’s preparations.
