Kurt Bassuener August 12th, 2008
Earlier today, Russian President Dmitri Medvedev announced a halt to Russian operations in Georgia just before the arrival of French President Nicholas Sarkozy in Moscow. “The security of our peacekeepers and civilians has been restored. The aggressor has been punished and suffered very significant losses. Its military has been disorganised…You know, the difference between lunatics and other people is that when they smell blood it is very difficult to stop them. So you have to use surgery.”
The Russian and French Presidents announced a six-point plan to end the hostilities, withdraw forces to prewar positions, and open international talks on the status of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Of the deal, French President Sarkozy said:
“We don’t yet have peace. But we have a provisional cessation of hostilities. And everyone should be aware that this is considerable progress. There is still much work to be done….What we want is to secure the best result.”
Sarkozy is to present the plan in person in Tbilisi.
Russia had already made clear that it wanted Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili out. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said today, before the Medvedev announcement: “It would be best if he left…I don’t think Russia will feel like talking with Mr. Saakashvili after what he did to our citizens.”
On the actual effect in Tskhinvali, which was Russia’s cited reason for its massive attack, it does appear that the damage was severe, but casualties could not be confirmed.
Georgia claimed that aerial bombardment and artillery shelling continued after Medvedev’s order was delivered. Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili in a press conference this afternoon also claimed that he was receiving reports of civilians being interned at camps in Kurta and Vladikavkaz, and of summary executions of ethnic Georgians. Georgia has also announced it will leave the Commonwealth of Independent States, a group of former Soviet republics dominated by Moscow. Georgia has also initiated a case against Russia at the International Criminal Court. At a rally today attended by an estimated 150,000, Saakashvili vowed that Russia would someday pay:
“I promise you today, that I’ll remind them of everything they have done and one day we will win”
Interestingly, Slovene Foreign Minister Dimitrij Rupel spotlighted the difficulty of arriving at a common EU position on the war.
“The old EU members have rather moderate positions (towards Russia) while the younger ones, having had experiences with Russia in the past, feel more strongly.”
Reports today state that the President of Ukraine - Viktor Yushchenko, Poland - Lech Kaczynski, and their Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian colleagues were en route to Tbilisi. President Kaczynski, who initiated the flight, said:
“This means the solidarity of five states with the nation that has fallen victim to aggression…We may say that the Russian state has once again shown its face, its true face…We are saddened by that but we must accept the facts of life.”
Even more worthy of note is the long list of assessments on the American position before the current war began - Dan Froomkin’s web column on the Washington Post site covers this in detail, referencing a report by Jonathan Landay of McClatchy papers that the US had discouraged action by Georgia, but thought it had a tacit understanding with Moscow that any reaction would be focused solely on South Ossetia:
“Bush administration officials, worried by what they saw as a series of provocative Russian actions, repeatedly warned Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili to avoid giving the Kremlin an excuse to intervene in his country militarily, U.S. officials said Monday…”
“But in the end, the warnings failed to stop the Georgian president — a Bush favorite — from launching an attack last week. . . .
“Pentagon officials said that despite having 130 trainers assigned to Georgia, they had no advance notice of Georgia’s sudden move last Thursday to send thousands of Georgian troops into South Ossetia to capture that province’s capital, Tskhinvali…”
“At the same time, U.S. officials said that they believed they had an understanding with Russia that any response to Georgian military action would be limited to South Ossetia.
“‘We knew they were going to go crack heads. We told them again and again not to do this,’ [a] State Department official said. ‘We thought we had an understanding with the Russians that any response would be South Ossetia-focused. Clearly it’s not.”
The Institute for War and Peace Reporting’s Tom de Waal gives a plausible litany of the rapied downward spiral in his article: “South Ossetia - an Avoidable Catastrophe.”
It remains to be see whether Georgia accepts the terms of the cease fire deal arrived at by Medvedev and Sarkozy, but it seems given the correlation of forces, he has little alternative.
NATO ambassaadors met today in Brussels with Georgia’s representative to the alliance, and according the US Ambassador Kurt Volker, “Given the events in Georgia, many allies expressed the sentiments that there cannot be business as usual with Russia.” Yet NATO’s Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer stated that the “Bucharest communique” from the April NATO summit remains valid. At that meeting, German and France shot down and effort by the US to formally invite Georgia and Ukraine into NATO, though it stated that one day they would be members.
