Читаем Putin's Wars полностью

The huge Kavkaz-2008 military exercise conducted near the Georgian border just before the outbreak of the war.

The evacuation of the population of the South Ossetian capital Tskhinvali before the war.

The surprising presence of a huge group of about fifty Russian journalists from the most important Russian press media and TV stations in Tskhinvali two days before the war began.

The active preparation for participation in the war by Cossack militias from Russia before the outbreak of war.

The incursion of regular Russian troops into South Ossetia before the outbreak of war.

According to Wesley K. Clark and Peter L. Levin, “Russia has already perpetrated denial-of-service attacks against entire countries, including Estonia, in the spring of 2007—an attack that blocked the Web sites of several banks and the prime minister’s Web site—and Georgia, during the war of August 2008. In fact, shortly before the violence erupted, Georgia’s government claimed that a number of state computers had been commandeered by Russian hackers and that the Georgian Ministry of Foreign Affairs had been forced to relocate its Web site to Blogger, a free service run by Google.”^[1] In the case of Georgia this would mean that the Russian cyber war already started before the hostilities began.

The Russian 58th Army is Russia’s main military force in the North Caucasus. In the weeks before the invasion it conducted major exercises with the code name “Kavkaz-2008” (Caucasus 2008). These exercises took place in North Ossetia, just north of the Georgian border. It was a combined forces exercise in which the Russian air force and the Black Sea Fleet also took part. The official reason for the exercise was to improve the army’s preparedness to fight terrorism. However, “such a force was hardly of great utility in fighting terrorists in the mountains, but it was ideal for a conventional invasion of a neighbor. In fact, this exercise was a trial run for the invasion about to take place. . . . It was de facto a war game to invade Georgia.”^[2] When, on August 2, the exercise officially ended, the troops did not return to their barracks, but remained deployed in the frontier region with Georgia. According to Andrey Illarionov, “the build-up culminated with the amassing of 80,000 regular troops and paramilitaries close to the Georgian border, at least 60,000 of which participated in the August war.”^[3]

The evacuation of the population of Tskhinvali was already wholly completed before the outbreak of the hostilities. Up to four thousand South Ossetians had crossed the border to neighboring North Ossetia in the Russian Federation. This exodus, meticulously prepared and organized by the authorities, was not a collective summer holiday, as President Kokoity wanted to make out. It was a preventive measure in a war of which the South Ossetian authorities—including the minister of defense, the Russian General Vasily Lunev (who would soon become the commander-in-chief of the attacking Russian 58th Army), already knew that it was going to take place.