The Russian 58th Army is Russia’s main military force in the North Caucasus. In the weeks before the invasion it conducted major exercises with the code name “Kavkaz-2008” (Caucasus 2008). These exercises took place in North Ossetia, just north of the Georgian border. It was a combined forces exercise in which the Russian air force and the Black Sea Fleet also took part. The official reason for the exercise was to improve the army’s preparedness to fight terrorism. However, “such a force was hardly of great utility in fighting terrorists in the mountains, but it was ideal for a conventional invasion of a neighbor. In fact, this exercise was a trial run for the invasion about to take place…. It was de facto a war game to invade Georgia.”[2] When, on August 2, the exercise officially ended, the troops did not return to their barracks, but remained deployed in the frontier region with Georgia. According to Andrey Illarionov, “the build-up culminated with the amassing of 80,000 regular troops and paramilitaries close to the Georgian border, at least 60,000 of which participated in the August war.”[3]
The evacuation of the population of Tskhinvali was already wholly completed before the outbreak of the hostilities. Up to four thousand South Ossetians had crossed the border to neighboring North Ossetia in the Russian Federation. This exodus, meticulously prepared and organized by the authorities, was not a collective summer holiday, as President Kokoity wanted to make out. It was a preventive measure in a war of which the South Ossetian authorities—including the minister of defense, the Russian General Vasily Lunev (who would soon become the commander-in-chief of the attacking Russian 58th Army), already knew that it was going to take place.
Said-Husein Tsarnaev, a journalist with the press agencies RIA Novosti and Reuters, arrived in Tskhinvali on August 4. He was very surprised when he entered the lobby of his hotel in this small provincial town in an isolated and desolate region, far from Moscow, and found the lobby invaded by a crowd of Russian journalists. “We’ve arrived in Tskhinvali three days prior to the attack on the city…,” he wrote later, “we’ve got accommodation in the hotel ‘Alan.’ At once, I’ve noticed about fifty journalists of leading TV channels and newspapers gathered in the hotel. I have experience with two Chechen campaigns and such a crowd of colleagues at the headquarters of peacekeeping forces I took as a disturbing signal.”[4] It was, indeed, a disturbing signal. What were these journalists—many of whom were celebrated Russian star reporters—doing in Tskhinvali, an outpost in the Caucasus, in the first days of August 2008? Who brought them there? What for? And why had the Russian government closed Tskhinvali to non-Russian reporters (except two journalists from Ukraine)? Russian websites have since published lists of the journalists’ names.[5] And, indeed, the fine fleur of the Russian media was present. The journalists represented almost every prominent paper, magazine, and news agency, including Izvestia, Novoe Vremya, Moskovskiy Komsomolets, Nezavisimaya Gazeta, Regnum, ITAR-TASS, and RIA Novosti, not to forget the most important Russian television channels: NTV, REN TV, TVTS, TV Channel “Rossiya,” TV Channel “Mir,” as well as the First and the Fifth TV Channel. Some of the journalists had already arrived on August 2, others on August 5 and 6. Why were they there, in Tskhinvali, a deserted ghost town left by its inhabitants for “holidays” in the Russian Federation? The journalists were obviously waiting for something to happen. They were waiting for what?
On August 6—two days before the start of the hostilities—the pro-Kremlin paper Nezavisimaya Gazeta published an article with the title “Don Cossacks Prepare to Defend the People of South Ossetia against Georgian Aggression.”[6] The Cossacks are fighters who historically played an important role in defending the frontiers of the Russian empire. After having been repressed by the communists, their hosts (locally organized groups) made a glorious comeback in the Russian Federation, and they have fought as mercenaries in many conflicts in the post-Soviet states. In the article in the Nezavisimaya Gazeta the ataman (leader) of the Don Cossacks announced that Cossack fighters were preparing to go to South Ossetia. He said that “Cossacks from the whole of Southern Russia were united in their effort to help the unrecognized republic.”[7] The question is why the Cossack militias were actively preparing to fight in South Ossetia on August 6, yet the war that broke out one day later was represented by the Kremlin as a complete surprise.
The sixth event, however, was the most significant. It was the entry of regular Russian troops into Georgia through the Roki tunnel. Russian troop movements must already have started on August 6, the day before the hostilities began. The Georgian government had intercepted cell-phone conversations between South Ossetian border guards saying that Russian border guards had taken over the control of the Roki tunnel at the Georgian side and that a Russian military column had passed through at about four o’clock in the morning. How many troops had gone through was not clear. The name of a Russian colonel who was in charge was mentioned. He commanded a unit of the 58th Army that was not authorized to be in Georgia. The Georgian peacekeeping commander in South Ossetia, Brigadier General Mamuka Kurashvili, phoned the Russian supreme commander of the mixed (Russian-Georgian) peacekeeping forces, Major General Marat Kulakhmetov, asking for an explanation. Kulakhmetov promised to call back, but did not do so. Thereupon President Saakashvili sent an envoy, Temuri Yakobashvili, to Tskhinvali to talk to a Russian diplomat, Yury Popov. Popov, however, did not show up. The reason he later gave was that his car had a flat tire and he didn’t have a spare one. The only Russian official Yakobashvili was able to meet in a deserted Tskhinvali was General Kulakhmetov. The Russian general proposed that Georgia declare a unilateral ceasefire. During the conversation he told Yakobashvili that he was fed up with the Ossetian separatists, who, according to him, had become uncontrollable, apparently suggesting that the Russians would eventually take a neutral stance if Tbilisi were to attack the separatists.[8]
A SLOW-MOTION ANNEXATION?
The Georgians did not fall in this trap. They followed Kulakhmetov’s advice and declared a unilateral ceasefire on August 7 at 6:40 p.m. The only response was an intensified shelling from 8:30 p.m. of the Georgian villages north of Tskhinvali by South Ossetian militias.[9] At 10:30 p.m. two Georgian peacekeepers were killed and six wounded. Saakashvili received new intelligence reports, transmitted by an American satellite, that a column of 150 Russian tanks had entered the Roki tunnel.[10] Saakashvili found himself confronted by a situation in which Russian troops and heavy equipment were being brought illegally into South Ossetia, gradually building up enough military potential for a direct attack on Georgia. Saakashvili’s efforts to call President Medvedev had no success. On the evening of August 7 Saakashvili was facing a dilemma: allow Russia’s military infiltration of Russia into South Ossetia to continue, and thereby permitting Russia to complete a huge military buildup, and enabling it to crush the Georgian army, or to act.
Ronald D. Asmus has described the extremely stressful and precarious situation in which the Georgian leadership found itself in the late hours of August 7, 2008. “They all believed Georgia was being invaded in a kind of slow-motion, incremental way.”[11] “Moscow,” he wrote, “was trying to de facto annex these two disputed enclaves bit by bit in slow motion—testing to see if the West would protest and daring Tbilisi to try to stop them.”[12] It was also clear that Moscow would have no difficulty in finding an adequate casus belli to invade the territory of Georgia proper in order to reach its ultimate goaclass="underline" to topple Saakashvili and bring about a regime change in Tbilisi. Waiting for the Russian troops to choose the right moment for attack meant that Georgia would leave the initiative to the other side. Considering the great inequality in manpower and military equipment[13] it would be an easy walkover for the Russians with disastrous consequences for Georgia. Confronted with the continuing incursion by Russian forces into South Ossetia and the intensified shelling of the Georgian villages north of Tskhinvali, at 11:30 p.m. Saakashvili ordered his troops to enter South Ossetia in order to occupy Tskhinvali and stop the advance of the Russian troops. “Did Saakashvili fall into a trap?” asked Svante Cornell and S. Frederick Starr.[14] They concluded: “Maybe so, but… even if he had not, a pretext would have been found to proceed with the campaign as it had been planned.”[15] Indeed, Saakashvili’s decision to attack was a case of a desperate, last minute forward defense, the ultimate trump card Georgia had at its disposal to avoid of being overrun by its huge neighbor. By blocking or preventing a Russian assault, the Georgian leadership—fully aware of the fact that Georgia could never win the war—hoped to win time, thereby enabling the United States and the EU to intervene and find a diplomatic solution.
3
Valentina Pop, “Saakashvili Saved Georgia from Coup, Former Putin Aide Says,” interview with Andrey Illarionov,
5
“Tskhinvalskiy Pul Spiskom,” December 4, 2008. This list gives thirty-one names. http://davnym-davno.livejournal.com/6488.html.
6
“Donskie kazaki gotovy vstat na zashchitu naroda Yuzhnoy Osetii ot gruzinskoy agressii,”
7
“Donskie kazaki gotovy vstat na zashchitu naroda Yuzhnoy Osetii ot gruzinskoy agressii.”
8
Cf. Marie Jégo, Alexandre Billette, Natalie Nougayrède, Sophie Shihab, and Piotr Smolar, “Autopsie d’un conflit,”
9
This shelling of Georgian villages inside South Ossetia by South Ossetian militias had already started on August 2. According to Martin Malek, “On August 5 a tripartite monitoring group, which included Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) observers and representatives of Russian peacekeeping forces in the region, issued a report. This document, signed by the commander of the Russian ‘peacekeepers’ in the region, General Marat Kulakhmetov, stated that there was evidence of attacks against several ethnic Georgian villages. It also claimed that South Ossetian separatists were using heavy weapons against the Georgian villages, which was prohibited by a 1992 ceasefire agreement.” (Martin Malek, “Georgia & Russia: The ‘Unkown’ Prelude to the ‘Five Day War,’”
13
Felgenhauer estimated the Georgian army to be seventeen-thousand-strong, supported by up to five thousand police officers (two thousand of Georgia’s elite 1st Infantry Brigade were deployed in Iraq. They were flown back but arrived after the war was over). The overall number of Russian troops that took part in the war in Georgia in August 2008 was approximately forty thousand. They were supported by ten thousand to fifteen thousand separatist militias. This makes the power ratio 2.5:1—illustrating the clear numerical superiority of the Russian forces, even without including differences in equipment. (Cf. Pavel Felgenhauer, “After August 7: The Escalation of the Russia-Georgia War,” in
14
Svante E. Cornell and S. Frederick Starr, “Introduction,” in