Putin's Wars полностью

Cf. Marie Jégo, Alexandre Billette, Natalie Nougayrède, Sophie Shihab, and Piotr Smolar, “Autopsie d’un conflit,” Le Monde (August 31–September 1, 2008). In secret reports from the US embassy in Tbilisi sent to the state department and subsequently published by WikiLeaks, this version of the facts was confirmed: “Putin has said to him [Saakashvili] that he does not care about South Ossetia, as long as Georgia avoids a massacre and solves the problem quietly.” (“La Géorgie, grande perdante du rapprochement russo-américain,” Le Monde (December 3, 2010).) This trap is also intimated by Salomé Zourabishvili, a former Georgian Minister of Foreign Affairs, who has become a fierce critic of Saakashvili. According to her the Russians must have given an unofficial green light to Georgia to intervene in South Ossetia to fight the local militias, which Moscow said it “could no longer control.” Zourabichvili even speaks of the possibility of a “tacit agreement.” (Zourabichvili, La tragédie géorgienne 2003–2008: de la révolution des Roses à la guerre, 317.) But even if such an improbable tacit agreement could have existed, the fact remains that at the very moment that Saakashvili ordered his attack he no longer had any illusions about the Russian response. We must also remember that this was not the first time the Kremlin had tried to disseminate active disinformation by suggesting that there was disagreement between themselves and the leadership of the self-proclaimed republics. Putin, for instance, when visiting Paris at the end of May 2008, said to his French interlocutors that he agreed with a Georgian peace plan that would grant Abkhazia great autonomy—a position contradicting Putin’s earlier positions. When the Abkhaz “President” Bagapsh visited Paris one month later, Bagapsh said: “Putin can agree with this plan, but we don’t and we never will do,” suggesting a difference of opinion between a “cooperative” Russian government and the “radical” separatists. (Cf. Piotr Smolar, “L’Abkhazie rejette la responsabilité de la crise sur les autorités géorgiennes,” Le Monde (June 22–23, 2008).)

9.

This shelling of Georgian villages inside South Ossetia by South Ossetian militias had already started on August 2. According to Martin Malek, “On August 5 a tripartite monitoring group, which included Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) observers and representatives of Russian peacekeeping forces in the region, issued a report. This document, signed by the commander of the Russian ‘peacekeepers’ in the region, General Marat Kulakhmetov, stated that there was evidence of attacks against several ethnic Georgian villages. It also claimed that South Ossetian separatists were using heavy weapons against the Georgian villages, which was prohibited by a 1992 ceasefire agreement.” (Martin Malek, “Georgia & Russia: The ‘Unkown’ Prelude to the ‘Five Day War,’” Caucasian Review of International Affairs 3, no. 2 (Spring 2009.) http://cria-online.org/7_10.html.)

10.

Jégo et al., “Autopsie d’un conflit.”

11.

Asmus, A Little War that Shook the World, 31.

12.

Asmus, A Little War that Shook the World, 25.

13.

Felgenhauer estimated the Georgian army to be seventeen-thousand-strong, supported by up to five thousand police officers (two thousand of Georgia’s elite 1st Infantry Brigade were deployed in Iraq. They were flown back but arrived after the war was over). The overall number of Russian troops that took part in the war in Georgia in August 2008 was approximately forty thousand. They were supported by ten thousand to fifteen thousand separatist militias. This makes the power ratio 2.5:1—illustrating the clear numerical superiority of the Russian forces, even without including differences in equipment. (Cf. Pavel Felgenhauer, “After August 7: The Escalation of the Russia-Georgia War,” in The Guns of August 2008: Russia’s War in Georgia, eds. Cornell and Starr, 170–173.)

14.