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Details of the onset of the war emerge (excerpts from the Wall Street Journal)
Tensions at Obscure Border
Led to Georgia-Russia Clash
By MARC CHAMPION and ANDREW OSBORN
August 16, 2008; Page A1
TSKHINVALI, Georgia -- The fighting that threatens to remake the post-Cold War world began in the craggy mountains of separatist South Ossetia province when ethnic fighting that has long plagued the area abruptly got much worse.
On Aug. 1, a roadside bomb hurt five Georgian policemen. By evening, snipers, presumably Georgian, had killed a half-dozen South Ossetians, mostly off-duty policemen out fishing or swimming. After dark, artillery shells began raining down on Georgian enclaves ringing this provincial capital. The South Ossetian leaders began sending women and children to safety in Russia -- and mobilizing men into brigades.
Six days later, fighting flared to a level not seen for years between the ethnically Georgian and ethnically Ossetian villages that form the patchwork of the separatist region. It was then that Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili sent thousands of U.S.-trained troops into the province, after which Russian forces swept in, crushing his assault.
Tension had been simmering since the early 1990s. After the Soviet Union collapsed, South Ossetia and another Georgian province, Abkhazia, fought to secede from Georgia. With the help of Russian military aid and volunteers, they defeated Georgian forces and became, in effect, unrecognized Russian protectorates. The end of those skirmishes left South Ossetia patrolled by hundreds of Russian, Georgian and Ossetian peacekeepers and a few dozen European observers.
This year, two things pushed tensions higher: Over Russian objections, Georgia moved toward joining the North Atlantic Treaty Organization; and Western countries, ignoring Russian opposition, recognized the independence of the onetime Yugoslavian province of Kosovo.
Russia strengthened its contingents of peacekeepers and periodically it sent planes over Georgia, sometimes launching rocket attacks. Georgia, with U.S. financial aid, built up its military and warned Western allies that Moscow was planning an attack. Pro-Russian separatist leaders in South Ossetia repeatedly told Russian officials that Georgia was preparing an assault.
In fact, both sides were preparing for war. Earlier in the year, Russia sent railroad troops to repair a railway in Abkhazia helpful for transporting military equipment. In April it shot down a Georgian unmanned spy plane. In July, Russia held exercises called Caucasus 2008 that were an undisguised rehearsal for invasion. Georgia, meanwhile, had by Aug. 7 pulled much of its army up to the area of Tskhinvali, the capital of its pro-Russian South Ossetian province, according to officials and witnesses on both sides.
Each side blames the other for the escalation early in August. Georgian officials say South Ossetians first fired artillery at ethnically Georgian villages Aug. 1
An Ossetian official says the Georgians had been fortifying their positions near the provincial capital of Tskhinvali for weeks, and claims they were just looking for a pretext to go to war. On the day the fighting began, "The whole day was planned by the Georgians, from the start to the finish, to provoke a clash," says Murat Tkhostov, an Ossetian who sits on a commission meant to settle the conflict.
Late that day, ethnically Georgian villages "came under tremendous bombardment from the South Ossetians," says William Dunbar, who was a correspondent for Russia Today, a Kremlin-funded television channel that promotes pro-Russian views. He visited the next day and says he tried to file a report on the shelling but his editors weren't interested. He soon resigned.
South Ossetian officials evacuated thousands of women and children to safety in Russia, a move Georgian officials interpreted as preparations for war. The civilian men who remained formed into partisan battalions. In Russia, ethnic Ossetians and their Cossack supporters -- quasi-military groups still active in southern Russia -- called on volunteer fighters to head to South Ossetia to fight.
On Aug. 7, Georgia's minister for reintegration, Temuri Yakobashvili, arrived in Tskhinvali for talks on the future of the province. They were supposed to include his Russian opposite number, Yuri Popov, and Ossetian leaders. But the only other person there was a Russian general, Marat Kulakhmetov.
Mr. Yakobashvili says the Russian general told him that the South Ossetian leader, Eduard Kokoity, had left. The Georgian minister then phoned Mr. Popov, and the Russian replied that he was stranded on the roadside 20 miles away with a flat tire.
"I asked him about the spare and he said that was flat, too," says Mr. Yakobashvili, an account Mr. Popov confirms.
The Ossetian capital was almost a ghost town by then, Mr. Yakobashvili says. He asked the Russian general what he would advise Georgia do in response to the shelling by South Ossetians. The answer: "Order a unilateral cease-fire and don't respond."
In the car on the way home, Mr. Yakobashvili phoned that advice to Georgian President Saakashvili. By the time he got back to the Georgian capital of Tbilisi, the president was on TV announcing such a ceasefire and no-response order.
The Russian Mr. Popov, meanwhile, says that when he arrived in Tbilisi, Ossetian leaders were no longer willing to meet as planned, citing a military build-up by Georgia. After fixing his flat at around 6 p.m., he headed to Tskhinvali to change their minds. He saw large numbers of Georgian tanks, armored personnel carriers, howitzers and other equipment rolling up the road from the Georgian town of Gori.
The troops, according the Mr. Yakobashvili, the Georgian minister, were meant only as a deterrent, as if "to say: don't mess with us."
Russian armor was on the move that day, too, according to Tamari Betsunashvili, a resident of Beloti, an ethnically Georgian Ossetian village in South Ossetia. Beloti is close to a rough road the Russian military long ago cut through the forests to reach Ossetian villages, bypassing the main road partly under Georgia's control.
Military convoys were a common sight there, but on Aug. 7 there were unusually large numbers of Russian army vehicles moving toward South Ossetia, she said, speaking in a Tbilisi school where refugees from South Ossetia are being housed.
In Tskhinvali, the Ossetian capital, Russia's Mr. Popov met with the South Ossetian leader, Mr. Kokoity, a former wrestler, Communist-youth leader and fighter in past separatist wars. Mr. Popov says he persuaded the South Ossetian boss to set talks for the next day at 1 p.m. The meeting never took place. By then, Georgian troops had stormed Tskhinvali.
The heaviest shelling started at around 11 p.m., when refugees from ethnically Georgian villages in South Ossetia say they started getting hit. According to the Russian military, meanwhile, Georgian shelling of the South Ossetian capital began at 12:30 a.m. It lasted much of the night.
In the Georgian presidential palace in Tbilisi, increasingly dire reports flowed in from the field. Two ethnically Georgian villages near Tskhinvali were reported destroyed, says Mr. Yakobashvili, who was in the room as President Saakashvili took the calls. Ground commanders on the ground were begging to be allowed to return fire and saying they couldn't evacuate the wounded, Mr. Yakobashvili says.
President Saakashvili says he initially resisted, but then he got a call reporting that a column of 150 military vehicles had been spotted coming into South Ossetia through the Roki tunnel from Russia. He says he figured a Russian invasion had begun, and the only way to stop it was to blow up a bridge on the road to the Ossetian capital and confront them north of Tskhinvali. That would require invading the capital city itself.
President Saakashvili spoke on the phone to Secretary of State Rice to brief her, according to the State Department's point man on Georgia, Matthew J. Bryza. Other U.S. and Georgian officials were talking too. Mr. Bryza says all had the same message, one they had been delivering for months: "Avoid an unwinnable confrontation with Russia."
President Saakashvili was undeterred. He ordered troops to take Tshkinvali, the Ossetian capital, and to knock out the bridge.
Hearing of the attack, Russia's Mr. Popov says he again called Georgia's Mr. Yakobashvili, who told him about the shelling of Georgian villages and about the Russian tanks moving south. The tank report "was absolute nonsense," Mr. Popov says. Georgian officials have provided no evidence to confirm the existence of the tank column.
Russian officials contend the Georgians planned the attack from the start. "They moved their forces into positions on high ground around Tskhinvali," says a Russian official. "It's very simple: The Georgians decided to take South Ossetia by force." He adds: "They thought we'd whine like over Kosovo but our response was very tough."
"They were using 19 planes," says a Georgian officer, Maj. Malkhaz Shavadze. "We pulled out and they kept bombing, because they didn't know we had left."
By this past Monday, Georgia's army was fleeing in disarray, south through Gori and back toward Tbilisi. Hundreds of Russian tanks, trucks, volunteers and troops continued to pour into South Ossetia through the Roki tunnel through the mountains. In Georgia's other separatist province, Abkhazia, more Russian troops landed both by sea and overland. They triumphantly confiscated large amounts of U.S.-supplied military equipment that Washington had shipped to the Georgian army in recent years. "American rations are really tasty," said Col. Igor Konoshenko, speaking in Tskhinvali this week.
Western leaders frantically pressured Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and his patron and prime minister, Vladimir Putin, to stop the advance. The Russians were defiant. In a conversation with French President Nicholas Sarkozy, Mr. Putin was "beside himself" with anger, says a French official familiar with the talk.
Mr. Medvedev initially demanded the removal of Georgia's president as a condition of any cease-fire. Western leaders successfully resisted, but that was about the only concession they won.
On Wednesday, Russian leaders appeared to place a seal on their military victory, receiving South Ossetian leader Kokoity and Abkhaz leader Sergei Bagapsh in the Kremlin. The Russians pledged to guarantee, on the ground and internationally, whatever status the two separatist, pro-Russian provinces of Georgia choose. Abkhazia, whose majority Georgian population was driven out in the early 1990s, has previously voted for independence. South Ossetia has voted to join Russia.
The world, said Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, "can forget about any talk about Georgia's territorial integrity."
On Thursday, with Russian armored personnel carriers within 25 miles of the Georgian capital of Tbilisi, Secretary of State Rice was persuading the Georgian president to accept a cease-fire.
"The U.S. has lost the Caucasus," said Georgy Khaindrava, a onetime Georgian minister for reintegration, who contends Mr. Saakashvili made a huge strategic error in trying to retake the South Ossetian capital. "My country is cut in pieces."
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