“Georgia: More Cluster Bomb Damage Than Reported,” Human Rights Watch, (November 4, 2008). Georgia also used cluster bombs in the conflict, but, unlike
Russia, it did not deny this. In the same report Human Rights Watch wrote that in the case of Georgia there was probably no intent to hit the civilian
population. Georgian Israeli-made M85 cluster bombs did not land in villages as a
result of an intentional strike, but probably due to a failure of the (equally Israeli-
supplied) Mk-4 rockets that fell down before reaching their goal.
22.
Paul A. Goble makes a useful difference between misinfomation and disinformation. “Misinformation,” he wrote, “the spread of complete false reports is
the less serious threat. Typically, reportage that is completely false is not only
easily identified but quickly challenged. But disinformation is another matter. .
. disinformation almost always involves the careful mixing of obvious truths with
falsehoods in a way that many will either find plausible or, at the very least, impossible
to check.” (Paul A. Goble, “Defining Victory and Defeat: The Information War Between
Russia and Georgia,” in The Guns of August 2008: Russia’s War in Georgia, eds. Cornell and Starr, 189–90.)
23.
“Georgia Conflict: Key Statements.”
24.
“South Ossetia conflict FAQs,” RIA Novosti (September 17, 2008).
25.
Brzezinski, “The Premature Partnership,” 79.
26.
François Paulhac, Les accords de Munich et les origines de la guerre de 1939 (Paris: Vrin, 1998), 139.
27.
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, 172–173.
28.
Illarionov, “Another Look at the August War,” 1.
29.
Paul Kennedy, The Realities Behind Diplomacy: Background Influences on British External Policy 1865–1980
(London: Fontana Press, 1989), 294.
30.
“EU Must be United and Firm on Russia,” Financial Times (September 1, 2008).
31.
On this lukewarm response, see Marcel H. Van Herpen, “Russia, Georgia, and the European
Union: The Creeping Finlandization of Europe,” The Cicero Foundation (September 2008). http://www.cicerofoundation.org/lectures/Marcel_H_Van_Herpen_Russia_Georgia_and_the_European_Union.pdf.
32.
Hélène Carrère d’Encausse, La Russie entre deux mondes (Paris: Librairie Arthème Fayard, 2010), 291.
33.
Carrère d’Encausse, La Russie entre deux mondes, 293.
34.
On September 11, 2008, during a meeting of the Valdai Club with Vladimir Putin in
Sochi, Carrère d’Encausse asked Putin if he would respond positively to Kokoity’s
demand for integration of South Ossetia into the Russian Federation. She wrote: “Vladimir
Putin answered with the greatest firmness that such a hypothesis was excluded. He
explained that if Russia in this specific case was unable to ignore the will of the
Ossetian people to be independent, it was firm regarding the principles of respecting
the inviolability of existing frontiers. This principle, according to him, applied
without exception to the Russian Federation which could not, therefore, welcome into
its midst a nation or territory that so desired.” Putin’s double-talk (he is speaking
about the “inviolability of existing frontiers” just after having changed the frontiers of Georgia by brutal force) brings her to the—naive—conclusion that
“the blunt refusal that was opposed to the Ossetian demand for integration into Russia
makes the Russian position clear: the August intervention in Georgia . . . could lead
to a settlement of a conflict between Georgia and its separatist minorities, [but]
in no case to a dossier that was of interest to Russia.” (Carrère d’Encausse, La Russie entre deux mondes, 298–299.)
35.
Cf. “Medvedev: August War Stopped Georgia’s NATO Membership,” Civil Georgia (November 21, 2011). Cf. also Brian Whitmore, “Medvedev Gets Caught Telling The Truth,”
RFE/RL (November 23, 2011).
36.
Condoleezza Rice, No Higher Honor: My Years in Washington (London: Simon & Schuster, 2010), 688.
37.
Rice, No Higher Honor: My Years in Washington, 688.
38.
