Читаем Putin's Wars полностью

This official Russian narrative, however, was a prime example of active disinformation, a deception method of which the Russian secret service is the unrivaled champion. When the war began the Kremlin immediately launched cyber attacks against Georgia and effectively blocked the websites of the Georgian government and the Georgian media. In so doing it was able to impose its own version of the events from the very start of the conflict. It even managed, with considerable success, to influence Western public opinion. Most correspondents of Western media in Moscow accepted uncritically the Russian narrative “that the war started with a Georgian attack, which was followed by a Russian response.” The only criticism to be heard was concerning the “disproportionate” character of the Russian response, a euphemism for the massive attacks outside South Ossetia and Abkhazia on the Georgian heartland and the destruction of the military and economic infrastructure of the country.^[2] The Russian disinformation campaign was very successful. It is telling that even Pavel Baev, an analyst who could never be accused of being naïve vis-à-vis the Putin regime, wrote on August 11—one day before the ceasefire: “[the Russian] surprise was so complete that Putin, according to those who saw him in Beijing, was pale with barely controlled rage, which he tried to convey to U.S. President George Bush and Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev.”^[3] For this interpretation of the facts Baev referred to a Russian source. A similar version of the facts could be found in a report by a European think tank, published some weeks after the war. In this report it was stated that “Moscow has responded to Saakashvili’s military attack on South Ossetia by escalating a conflict over a secessionist region into a full-scale inter-state war with Georgia.”^[4]

Does this interpretation of the Russian war against Georgia as a Russian response, provoked by a Georgian aggression that led to a genocide, stand up to the facts? No, it does not. This war, far from being—as most media at the time wanted to believe—a reckless act, initiated by an impulsive Georgian president, was a carefully planned operation. It had been prepared by the Russian leadership since 2000 through a process of gradual and purposive escalation. Step by step this process was implemented and brought to its final dénouement in August 2008. If we want to analyze this war and the factors that led to it we should, therefore, analyze its complete history and this history does not start on August 7, 2008, but in the year 2000. That we take this choice of start date is no coincidence, because it is the same year in which Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin was elected president of the Russian Federation. From this point Russia’s Georgia policy changed radically, although not particularly in terms of its objectives. These remained generally the same as at the beginning of the 1990s. These objectives were to divide Georgia and undermine its viability as an independent and sovereign state. The active military support given by Russia to separatist movements during the civil wars in South Ossetia (1991–1992) and Abkhazia (1992–1993), as well as its support for the corrupt autocrat Aslan Abashidze in Adjara (Southwest Georgia) until his forced resignation in 2004, had no objective other than to weaken Georgia. Plans to incorporate Abkhazia into Russia already existed in the 1990s, as became clear from a remark made by Pavel Grachev, then Russian minister of defense, who told Georgian President Eduard Shevardnadze: “We can’t leave Abkhazia, because then we’d lose the Black Sea.”^[5] Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote shortly after the civil wars: “In Georgia, military intervention gave Moscow the pretext for political mediation. In the course of it Georgia learned . . . that Russia as an umpire is not very different from Russia as an empire.”^[6]