In July Russia further increased the pressure. On July 3, 2008, an assassination attempt was made on Dmitry Sanakoev, head of the Tbilisi-backed interim administration of South Ossetia, which still controlled about one third of the territory, including some villages north of the separatist capital Tskhinvali. Throughout the month of July new incidents took place.
On July 9 Moscow demonstratively acknowledged that four Russian Air Force planes had flown a mission over South Ossetia. That action sought to deter Georgia from flying unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), thus blinding Tbilisi to Russian and proxy military movements in the area. A series of roadside bomb blasts targeted Georgian police patrols. During the second half of July and the first days of August, Russian-commanded Ossetian troops under the authority of (Russian-led) South Ossetian authorities fired repeatedly at Georgian-controlled villages, forcing Georgian police to fire back defensively.[45]
For informed observers it was clear that the wheels of war were turning. On July 5, 2008, a publication in the Russian online paper Forum.msk.ru titled “Russia is on the verge of a great Caucasian war,”[46] quoted Pavel Felgenhauer, who predicted the outbreak of a war with Georgia. “The most important fact is,” Felgenhauer said, “that around Putin’s circle the decision has already been taken to start a war with Georgia in August.” The chief editor of the paper, Anatoly Baranov, just returning from the North Caucasus where he had spoken with Russian officers stationed in Rostov-on-Don, wrote: “The army wants to fight…. They see in the war the solution to internal political problems, the consolidation of the nation, a purge of the elites, in general everything that is positive.”[47] On August 3, four days before the outbreak of the war, the Georgian internet portal Gruziya Online (Georgia Online), wrote that five battalions of the Russian 58th Army had passed through the Roki tunnel, a 6-kilometer tunnel that is the only direct road connection between Russia and South Ossetia.[48] The same day the Russian deputy minister of defense, Nikolay Pankov, was in Tskhinvali and conducted secret talks with the separatist South Ossetian “President” Kokoity and other leaders of his government. An even more disquieting fact, reported by the Internet paper, was that the evacuation of women and children from Tskhinvali had begun. Four thousand people were said to have been evacuated. When Kokoity was asked about it, he “declared that they had not evacuated the children, but sent them on holiday.”[49] A few days later, on August 7, the master of this announced war, Vladimir Putin, was to board the plane in Moscow to attend, together with other world leaders, the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games in Beijing.
THE HOT WAR: AUGUST 7–12, 2008
On August 7, 2008, the day the war started, the situation was so tense that only a spark was needed to set Georgia afire. There have been discussions afterward over who actually fired the first shot. It was clearly in Russia’s interests that this first shot should be fired by Georgia so that the Russian aggression could be presented as a defense. In the EU-sponsored Tagliavini Report, published on September 30, 2009, the opening of the hostilities was attributed to Georgia. “It is not contested,” wrote the authors of the report, “that the Georgian armed forces started an armed offensive in South Ossetia on the basis of President Saakashvili’s order given on 7 August 2008 at 23.35.”[50] The report confirmed, however, that at the very moment the hostilities started, troops from the regular Russian army—troops that were not part of Russia’s peacekeeping forces—were already present in South Ossetia, that is, on Georgian soil. They were there illegally, without permission from the Georgian authorities. This fact came on top of prior violations of Georgian sovereignty, such as the passport offensive and the provocative flights of Russian fighter jets over the Georgian airspace. The incursion of Russian regular troops (and irregular troops in the form of Chechen and North Ossetian fighters coming from Russia) into South Ossetia, together with tanks and heavy weapons, was a violation of Georgian sovereignty of a totally new, and extremely menacing kind. In fact it constituted as such a casus belli.
Chapter 14
The War with Georgia, Part II
Six Events Announcing the Kremlin’s Preparation for War
Different authors have tried to reconstruct the chain of events leading to the outbreak of war. In this chain of events there are at least six events that should be considered. They are, separately, and taken together, a clear indication of Russia’s preparations for war. These events are as follows:
1. A cyber war, launched by Russian servers before the outbreak of the hostilities, paralyzing Georgian government websites. This cyber war must have been prepared well in advance.
2. The huge Kavkaz-2008 military exercise conducted near the Georgian border just before the outbreak of the war.
3. The evacuation of the population of the South Ossetian capital Tskhinvali before the war.
4. 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.
5. The active preparation for participation in the war by Cossack militias from Russia before the outbreak of war.
6. 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.
46
“Rossiya stoit na grani bolshoy Kavkazkoy voyny,”
48
“58-ay armiya RF gotova voyti v Tskhinvali,”
1
Wesley K. Clark and Peter L. Levin, “Securing the Information Highway: How to Enhance the United States’ Electronic Defenses,”