Читаем Putin's Wars полностью

For informed observers it was clear that the wheels of war were turning. On July 5, 2008, a publication in the Russian online paper Forum.msk.ru titled “Russia is on the verge of a great Caucasian war,”^[46] quoted Pavel Felgenhauer, who predicted the outbreak of a war with Georgia. “The most important fact is,” Felgenhauer said, “that around Putin’s circle the decision has already been taken to start a war with Georgia in August.” The chief editor of the paper, Anatoly Baranov, just returning from the North Caucasus where he had spoken with Russian officers stationed in Rostov-on-Don, wrote: “The army wants to fight . . . . They see in the war the solution to internal political problems, the consolidation of the nation, a purge of the elites, in general everything that is positive.”^[47] On August 3, four days before the outbreak of the war, the Georgian internet portal Gruziya Online (Georgia Online), wrote that five battalions of the Russian 58th Army had passed through the Roki tunnel, a 6-kilometer tunnel that is the only direct road connection between Russia and South Ossetia.^[48] The same day the Russian deputy minister of defense, Nikolay Pankov, was in Tskhinvali and conducted secret talks with the separatist South Ossetian “President” Kokoity and other leaders of his government. An even more disquieting fact, reported by the Internet paper, was that the evacuation of women and children from Tskhinvali had begun. Four thousand people were said to have been evacuated. When Kokoity was asked about it, he “declared that they had not evacuated the children, but sent them on holiday.”^[49] A few days later, on August 7, the master of this announced war, Vladimir Putin, was to board the plane in Moscow to attend, together with other world leaders, the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games in Beijing.

The Hot War: August 7–12, 2008

On August 7, 2008, the day the war started, the situation was so tense that only a spark was needed to set Georgia afire. There have been discussions afterward over who actually fired the first shot. It was clearly in Russia’s interests that this first shot should be fired by Georgia so that the Russian aggression could be presented as a defense. In the EU-sponsored Tagliavini Report, published on September 30, 2009, the opening of the hostilities was attributed to Georgia. “It is not contested,” wrote the authors of the report, “that the Georgian armed forces started an armed offensive in South Ossetia on the basis of President Saakashvili’s order given on 7 August 2008 at 23.35.”^[50] The report confirmed, however, that at the very moment the hostilities started, troops from the regular Russian army—troops that were not part of Russia’s peacekeeping forces—were already present in South Ossetia, that is, on Georgian soil. They were there illegally, without permission from the Georgian authorities. This fact came on top of prior violations of Georgian sovereignty, such as the passport offensive and the provocative flights of Russian fighter jets over the Georgian airspace. The incursion of Russian regular troops (and irregular troops in the form of Chechen and North Ossetian fighters coming from Russia) into South Ossetia, together with tanks and heavy weapons, was a violation of Georgian sovereignty of a totally new, and extremely menacing kind. In fact it constituted as such a casus belli.

Notes

1.

Vaclav Havel, Valdas Adamkus, Mart Laar, Vytautas Landsbergis, Otto de Habsbourg, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Timothy Garton Ash, André Glucksmann, Mark Leonard, Bernard-Henri Lévy, Adam Michnik, and Josep Ramoneda, “Le test géorgien, un nouveau Munich?” Le Monde (September 23, 2009). The real question was, indeed, who invaded and not who fired the first bullet. As John Lukacs wrote, it is an old ruse used by politicians, “who wanted war (and attempted to tempt their opponents ‘to maneuver [them] into firing the first shot.’” (John Lukacs, Democracy and Populism: Fear and Hatred (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2005), 211.)

2.