Re: Georgia under attack by Russia
So far according to the press reports that I read, the war is very popular in Russia. Russia's population are dead set against Georgia's government, democratic though it may be, and are happy that Vlad The Impaler is taking action against it.
Re: Georgia under attack by Russia
^ Of course its popular. UTD was just trying to score debating points even if it means being completely divorced from human psychology and realities on the ground.
I think death is sooner then later for him… The end might be like that of Milosevic… but wait Russians are a bit more brutal, they might hang him up in one of those Moscow’s prisons.
The poor bugger making an appeal to the US “people”… What a fool.
I suppose they have little to root for, Russia hasn't won any gold in China.
I suppose they have little to root for, Russia hasn't won any gold in China.
Well they are still beating other countries.... literally.
Moscow’s expanding military operation in Georgia and the threat of a large-scale international conflict led to a frenzy of diplomatic activity Monday, with Europe in the lead.
French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner, whose country holds the rotating EU presidency, made a lightening visit to the Georgian capital, Tbilisi, and had President Mikheil Saakashvili sign a cease-fire pledge that will also be presented to the Russian leadership.
Yet enormous doubts prevailed about the persuasive power that such a document might have in Moscow, where President Dmitry Medvedev on Monday indirectly compared Saakashvili with Adolf Hitler and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin drew a comparison with Saddam Hussein.
In an effort to maximize the initiative’s weight, French President Nicolas Sarkozy was planning to follow Kouchner’s path.
Sarkozy will arrive in Tbilisi on Tuesday and later travel to Moscow, Saakashvili said in televised comments.
However, the French Embassy would only confirm that Sarkozy planned “a large meeting with officials,” including Medvedev, in Moscow on Tuesday. “It might be logistically difficult to travel to Tbilisi the same day,” embassy spokesman Ivan Sergeff said.
Kouchner also traveled Monday to Gori, the nearest Georgian town to the conflict zone in South Ossetia, where a Russian bomber attack caused civilian deaths Saturday.
He later traveled to Vladikavkaz, the capital of Russia’s North Ossetia, to speak to refugees there, Sergeff said.
Kouchner was accompanied by his Finnish counterpart, Alexander Stubb, whose country currently leads the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.
Both ministers planned to travel to Moscow late Monday.
Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov will hold talks with them Tuesday morning and hold a press briefing later, a Foreign Ministry spokesman said.
Yet, increasingly belligerent rhetoric in Moscow denouncing Western support for Georgia boded ill for peace talks.
Speaking during a televised address to the government presidium, Putin lambasted the United States for helping Georgia move its troops home from Iraq. This amounted to “a movement away from a settlement,” he said.
“Of course, Saddam Hussein had to be hung for his destruction of several Shiite villages. But as for the current Georgian leadership – who in one hour razed 10 Ossetian villages to the ground, who crushed children and the elderly with tanks, who burned alive peaceful citizens in barns – these ‘activists’ should of course be protected,” Putin complained.
It was unclear what part Putin would take in negotiations. His spokesman Dmitry Peskov said he knew of no planned meetings between Putin and the European visitors Tuesday.
**Medvedev compared current support for Georgia with Western appeasement of Hitler in 1938. **
Georgia President Mikheil Saakashvili’s ‘calculated gamble’
When he moved troops into disputed South Ossetia, the young leader adored by Washington put his nation in a precarious position.
Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, a U.S.-trained attorney regarded by Washington as a pro-democracy wunderkind, has made a political career of brinkmanship with neighboring Russia. This time, he may have overplayed his hand.
Saakashvili helped oust former Soviet Foreign Minister and Georgian President Eduard Shevardnadze in the so-called Rose Revolution in 2003 and became Europe’s youngest president the following January at the age of 36. He has been jousting with Moscow ever since over control of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, two pro-Russian regions of his country.
A lover of Georgian wine and Western culture, Saakashvili is described as supremely confident and even autocratic. He moved troops into disputed South Ossetia last week as a new Russian president presided in Moscow, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and President Bush visited Beijing, and much of the world’s attention was focused on the Summer Olympics. Georgian forces came under overwhelming air and ground attack and were quickly repelled.
Saakashvili says his forces were provoked into action in South Ossetia; Russia accuses him of launching an offensive move against his nemesis. Either way, he has ended up in a more precarious position.
“It was a calculated gamble and he miscalculated,” said F. Stephen Larrabee, corporate chair in European Security at the Rand Corp. in Washington. “He has been forced to withdraw. It’s a military blunder. It caused an international incident.”
While Georgians are likely to rally behind Saakashvili as long as they feel under threat from Russia, in the long run he may face a backlash for launching military action that failed and may make it impossible to bring a breakaway region back into the fold.
The move may also have jeopardized Saakashvili’s larger goal for Georgia to join NATO, observers said. They said Saakashvili’s pursuit of NATO membership has been making the Russian government nervous and more aggressive, and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization is unlikely to want a new risk-taker in the family.
Saakashvili has been the Bush administration’s poster child for pro-Western movements. He keeps an autographed photograph of himself with Bush in his office and is one of the closest U.S. allies in the region. The United States supplied him with military aid to build his army and he, in turn, sent Georgian troops to Iraq to support the U.S. mission there.
Analysts credit Saakashvili and a small circle of young advisors with cleaning up corruption in Georgia and revitalizing the economy. However, they say he is impatient, both with internal political dissent and secessionist movements.
As recently as last month, the U.S. government publicly cautioned Saakashvili to pursue diplomacy in Georgia’s dispute with Russia over the provinces. At a joint appearance with Saakashvili last month in front of Tbilisi’s new glass-domed presidential palace, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice promised to fight for Georgian membership in NATO.
But she also said pointedly that “violence should not be carried out by any party.”
Now Saakashvili is complaining that the West has failed to come to his side.
“We are receiving only moral and humanitarian help from the international community, but we need more than that,” he said in a televised address Monday evening.
He said Russia plans to oust him and take control of Georgia. “An attempt of repeated occupation and enslavement of Georgia, depriving our country of its independence is underway,” Saakashvili said. “Russia’s goal is to put an end to the existence of the Georgian state.”
Whether or not Russia wants control of Georgia, it’s clear that Russians feel tremendous personal animosity toward Saakashvili, whom they view as a U.S. puppet bent on harming Russian interests.
Robert Legvold, a Columbia University professor who is an expert on Russia and Georgia, quoted Russians close to Putin as saying that the Russian prime minister views Saakashvili the same way the U.S. government views Fidel Castro.
“Putin has an extraordinarily adverse view of Saakashvili himself,” Legvold said.
Saakashvili was touring the Georgian city of Gori dressed in a flak jacket Monday when his security detail threw him to the ground for fear that they were about to be attacked by Russian warplanes. The move proved to be unnecessary but highlighted the risk his team believes he faces.
Tall and brash, Saakashvili has been a larger-than-life character. He is a Georgian nationalist married to a Dutch woman and moves seamlessly among spoken Georgian, Russian, English and French.
A graduate of Columbia and George Washington universities in law and human rights, Saakashvili won election in January 2004 with 96% of the vote. He vowed to fight corruption at home and to re-integrate the pro-Russian regions of Adzharia, Abkhazia and South Ossetia into Georgia.
Within months, he managed to oust Adzharia’s strongman, Aslan Abashidze. He won kudos at home for toughness, but Georgians soon learned that Saakashvili could be as tough with internal opposition. Political opponents were sometimes jailed and often ignored or mocked.
The opposition accuses him of behaving like a king. A man once thought of as emotional and democratic increasingly has been called intemperate and autocratic. Some regard him as reckless in his pursuit of the breakaway regions.
Last year Saakashvili declared a 15-day state of emergency after riot police battled protesters demanding parliamentary elections that he had postponed. Saakashvili blamed Moscow for fostering the protests. He went on television to dismiss the protesters as “hoodlums who don’t deserve to be taken seriously,” Legvold recalled.
The success in Adzharia may have emboldened Saakashvili to go after South Ossetia in 2004. He sent in troops, but ran up against stronger than expected opposition from locals and was forced to withdraw.
His decision to go in again now has left some analysts scratching their heads.
“Possibly they thought they could move quickly enough to present the Russians with a fait accompli,” said Cory Welt, a professor of Russian and Eurasian studies at Georgetown University.
Legvold at Columbia University said Saakashvili erred in thinking the Russians would allow him such a strategic victory in South Ossetia.
“The heart of the matter is a miscalculation that the Russians would not react at the level they reacted and push back as they did,” Legvold said. “A lot of the crockery is broken and he’s greatly weakened. He’s made his political pledge to return these territories to Georgia nearly impossible.”
Georgia President Mikheil Saakashvili’s ‘calculated gamble’ - Los Angeles Times
Re: Georgia under attack by Russia
If you scroll down this page… you can see that Russia has started deploying SS-21 ballistic missile launchers inside Georgia.
Press Briefing by Press Secretary Dana Perino and Senior Director for East Asian Affairs Dennis Wilder and Deputy National Security Advisor Ambassador Jim Jeffrey
In terms of how we’ve responded to this, the President was informed immediately on Friday, when we received news of the first two SS-21 Russian missile launchers into Georgian territory. He immediately – this was at the Great Hall – he immediately met with President Putin.
More news
Re: Georgia under attack by Russia
As a believer in machiavellian realpolitik, I really have to commend Putin though. Appalling though violating the sovereignty of another country is, as a political move his handling of Georgia was masterful. From a machiavellian perspective, he did everything right.
He's made himself even more popular at home; restored Russian national pride by making the West and the USA in particular look impotent; delivered a strong message to his neighbours that aligning against Russia will no longer be tolerated; and left Russia positioned stronger than ever internationally. The West still needs Russia more than ever to leverage the UNSC against Iran; the Georgian invasion had proven that the West will overlook Russian strong-arm tactics in the hope of being able to continue working with Russia on other issues.
And all this came at the cost of virtually no Russian lives, but for a handful of soldiers. (From a machiavellian point of view, Georgian and South Ossetian civilian casualties are of no consequence).
Russia flexed its muscles and the rest of the world took no action at all but for a mouthful of words and polite requests to please stop. So today... Russia emerges on top. The Right Action at the Right Time.
Re: Georgia under attack by Russia
I think the American Response would be the rapid rebuilding of Georgian Ground Forces and giving them American Arms and Materials.
Russia could respond by selling more sophisticated weaponry to Iran and Syria to retaliate against this.
Re: Georgia under attack by Russia
The word circulating is that a peace deal is in the making and Russian President has ordered the seizure of any further attacks. Is this true? There are other news which go totally opposite of this and say that Russia continues to dig deeper in despite the announcement of the Russian President.
Re: Georgia under attack by Russia
Sarkozy and Medvedev had a press conference confirming that a cease-fire is being ordered.
Georgia agrees to Russian-French plan to settle conflict - CNN.com
Apparently Russians were still firing missiles into Georgia even after Medvedev statement, but its expected that the cease-fire order will soon filter down to the lower level commanders.
A member of an ethnic Ossetian militia mounts a South Ossetian flag with a black band to mark a day of mourning for victims of the conflict in South Ossetia, in the village of Khetagurovo, outside the South Ossetian capital of Tshinvali, August 13, 2008.
Demonstrators supporting the Abkhazians, South Ossetians and Adighas hold their flags as they protest against Georgia in front of the Georgian consulate in Istanbul August 13, 2008. The placard at right reads: “Fascist Georgian Administration, the tool of NATO and the U.S. Give up your bloody goals in the Caucasus”, referring to the conflict in South Ossetia.
A South Ossetian woman greets Russian soldiers in the South Ossetian capital of Tshinvali, August 12, 2008.
A Tskhinvali resident tends to the grave of a pregnant woman killed by shrapnel during the recent conflict between Russia and Georgia in South Ossetia’s capital August 12, 2008.
A man in Krasnoyarsk lowers the Russian national flag to half-mast as the country observes a day of mourning for victims of the Georgian region of South Ossetia August 13, 2008.
Camp for refugees from South Ossetia, in the southern Russian town of Alagir, August 13, 2008.
A South Ossetian child sits in a newly opened refugee camp in the South Ossetian capital of Tshinvali August 12, 2008.
Re: Georgia under attack by Russia
Ossetian refugees mourn their dead
Amazing rescue of baby born on night of attacks
Tears and sorrow
Saakashvili
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7i2CQh4cAo)
Russian is not aggressor - US politician
Re: Georgia under attack by Russia
US troops now going in on a humanitarian mission. Wonder if any slip ups on either side woudl spark a bigger mistake?
Re: Georgia under attack by Russia
so glad to see a conflict in which muslims are not involved in
so glad to see a conflict in which muslims are not involved in
Not quite true. 10-15% of Russians are Muslims (7-9% considered to be actively practicing muslims, the remainder identify themself as Muslim). And because Russia has universal conscription, that would in turn mean that there are up to 150,000 Muslims currently serving in the Russian armed forces, nearly 90,000 of whom are practicing Muslims).
Re: Georgia under attack by Russia
^
That must have been hard for them slaughtering their Chechnyan brothers and sisters with no regard for innocent lives.
Re: Georgia under attack by Russia
^^
Incidentally, on their kavkazcentre website, the Chechan separatists are condemning Muslims who participate in the Russian invasion of Georgia as being apostate mercenaries who are enemies of Caucusas Emirate.
