That the Georgians attacked first, and that it was an attempt not to repulse a Russian attack but to retake South Ossetia, is also confirmed by a conversation the Polish foreign minister Radoslaw Sikorski had with his Georgian counterpart Eka Tkeshelashvili the day before the attack on Tskhinvali. ‘Eka called me and said they were going to establish constitutional authority over South Ossetia. What I understood was that they were moving in. I warned her not to overplay their hand and to be very careful, because allowing yourself to be provoked would have dire consequences.’22
The fact that President Medvedev was on holiday on a Volga riverboat, Prime Minister Putin was in Beijing for the opening of the Olympic Games and foreign minister Lavrov was in the middle of Russia (four-and-a-half-hours’ flight from Moscow), and all had to rush back to Moscow to deal with the crisis, also suggests that Russia was taken by surprise and did not instigate the attack – even though its army was clearly well prepared to respond.
So why did this war erupt when it did? Only a week or so earlier, Georgia’s leaders had been on holiday. Their best troops were serving in Iraq. Although Saakashvili wished to regain the lost territories, he appeared to be giving diplomacy a last chance. As late as 7 August, Georgia’s negotiator, Temuri Yakobashvili, even went to Tskhinvali for planned talks that failed to materialise (because the South Ossetian side refused to take part and the Russian special envoy failed to arrive, saying he had a flat tyre). Russia, it is true, had been sabre-rattling – but mainly to dissuade Georgia from attacking rather than because it was contemplating an attack itself; Moscow in fact had little to gain from attacking Georgia and had never (despite claims to the contrary) shown any desire to annexe or even recognise the two regions. Its clobbering of Georgia and subsequent recognition of South Ossetia and Abkhazia as independent ‘states’ should not be seen as retrospective proof that this was what it intended to do all along.
It seems to me that right up until the eve of battle neither side was seriously planning to go to war (though both were preparing for it). That would mean that the fatal decision was taken at the last minute by Saakashvili and his closest advisers. Perhaps they felt that the world’s eyes were on the Olympics in Beijing; perhaps they weighed up everything they had heard from the Americans recently and decided that, on balance, they would have their support; perhaps they really were given intelligence (even if it was false) that the Russians were already streaming through the Roki tunnel; perhaps they saw the failure of the Russians and South Ossetians to turn up for talks with their negotiator as an ominous sign, and Medvedev’s evasiveness and hint that ‘things could get worse’ as a threat; perhaps they jumped at what they thought was an unexpected opportunity to retake South Ossetia. Whatever the reasons, the decision confirmed the worst fears of Saakashvili’s American and other Western colleagues – who liked him, respected him, loved his democratic credentials, but were very alive to his unpredictability, his impulsiveness, even his instability. One of the enduring images of the war is of Saakashvili, recorded by a BBC camera as he waited to go on air for a live broadcast, nervously stuffing the end of his tie into his mouth. The Russians leapt on this as proof of his ‘insanity’. But many of his Western colleagues also had their doubts. When Angela Merkel had talks with him as a peace settlement was being thrashed out, he was extremely agitated, drank from an empty glass and knocked a bottle of water across the table.
One senior American official (extremely close to Saakashvili) witnessed a top-level get-together in Tbilisi, after midnight, a few weeks before the war: ‘My impression was just – what a rip-roaring and disorganised way to make really important decisions. But it is the Georgian way – it is at least how that group does things. I mean, they weren’t drunk, they weren’t juvenile or stupid, they were just kind of shooting the breeze. I came in and they said, “You say we don’t have an interagency coordination process, well this is how we do it. Would you like some wine?”’
Though it was Georgia, in the end, that lit the touch-paper, it was Russia that found itself in the dock for the conflagration. Partly, this was because views were coloured by the initial international television coverage of the war, which showed little, if any, of the Georgian bombing and destruction of Tskhinvali and a great deal of the subsequent Russian bombing of Gori. That in turn happened because the Russians kept journalists out of South Ossetia, whereas the Georgians positively encouraged the press to go to Gori. The BBC’s foreign editor, Jon Williams, noted in a blog: ‘It’s not been safe enough to travel from Tbilisi to the town of Tskhinvali in South Ossetia, the scene, say the Russians, of destruction at the hands of the Georgians. Not until Wednesday – six days after the first shots were fired – was a BBC team able to get in to see what had happened for themselves, and then only in the company of Russian officials.’
The role of PR advisers in the war has been much written about, and much exaggerated. Georgia’s principal asset was President Saakashvili himself, who gave a constant stream of interviews, in fluent English and French – without, I fancy, much encouragement from his Western PR team. Moscow, on the other hand, steadfastly resisted the urgings of its PR advisers to allow journalists to travel to South Ossetia, and only belatedly began to offer English-speaking interviewees to stations such as the BBC and CNN.
But the main reason for the opprobrium heaped upon Russia rather than Georgia was because – whatever the circumstances – it invaded a neighbouring, independent country. It did this in order to prevent that country from doing something absolutely legitimate under international law – restoring (albeit in brutal fashion) its territorial integrity in precisely the same way as Russia had restored its rights over Chechnya. The Russian leadership was incapable of seeing this parallel. It accused the West of tolerating Georgia’s aggression, forgetting that the West had by and large also tolerated Russia’s much more brutal assault on Chechnya. Both cases were seen by the West as internal affairs. Attacking a foreign country is different. As the Russian journalist Andrei Kolesnikov of Novaya gazeta put it, ‘Russia behaved as if it were the mother country and Georgia was its remote, rebellious province.’
The result was the dismemberment of Georgia, a sovereign state, and the permanent displacement of hundreds of thousands of people, mainly Georgians, from their homes on land that they and their ancestors had inhabited for centuries. In the case of Abkhazia, the Russians effectively handed the territory, now ‘ethnically cleansed’ of Georgians, to a tiny nation who prior to 1991 had comprised just one-fifth of the population.23 One-sixth of Georgia’s territory is now occupied by Russian troops.