Georgia: An Inevitable War?

Via This is Tbilisi Calling, EurasiaNet has an article detailing allegations suggesting that Russia’s invasion had been planned in advance. Indeed, opinion in Georgia and among some international commentators is that such a military operation would have otherwise taken months to implement had not the troops been ready. Simply put, some consider that the Georgian president’s temper got the better of him and allege that Russian provocation worked.

Before the guns of August, there were the maneuvers of July.

Less than one month before Russia’s armed forces entered Georgia on August 8, they held massive military training exercises in the North Caucasus involving 8,000 servicemen and 700 pieces of military hardware.

At center stage in those maneuvers — which took place in the second half of July, not far from Georgia’s border — was Russia’s 58th Army, the very unit that would later play a key role in the incursion.

Those exercises are just one link in a chain of incidents suggesting that Russia’s military action in Georgia was planned months in advance, awaiting only an appropriate pretext to act.

Military analyst Pavel Felgenhauer says the aim, from the start, was to overthrow Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili and his pro-Western government.

[…]

“A decision was made for the war to start in August. The war would have happened regardless of what the Georgians did. Whether they responded to the provocations or not, there would have been an invasion of Georgia,” Felgenhauer says. “The goal was to destroy Georgia’s central government, defeat the Georgian army, and prevent Georgia from joining NATO.”

[…]

For now, there is no smoking gun to prove Russia methodically plotted its incursion into Georgia. But the first sign that Russia might seek a military advance on Georgia came more than a year ago — in July 2007, when Moscow withdrew from the Conventional Forces in Europe treaty, an amended Cold War-era document setting limitations on troops and military hardware between the Atlantic and the Ural Mountains.

[…]

Not everyone is prepared to endorse the notion of a premeditated, orchestrated war by Russia. Aleksandr Golts, a Moscow-based defense analyst, says the timing of the conflict, which came at a time when the country’s leadership was absent from the capital — President Dmitry Medvedev was in the Volga region and Putin was attending the Olympics in Beijing — does not suggest the event was planned in advance.

“It is difficult to imagine that Russia prepared such a provocation while neither of the country’s two leaders was in Moscow,” Golts said. “It is [also] difficult to imagine that Russia prepared to go to war and then, when Saakashvili fell into the trap, waited 13 or 14 hours, by my count, before deploying forces.”

But regardless of whether the war was prefabricated, says Golts, the blame remains squarely with the Kremlin. “Russia’s policies over the past several years caused this war. And for this they bear responsibility.”

Photo: Russian soldiers, Gori, Republic of Georgia © Onnik Krikorian / Oneworld Multimedia 2008