Georgia invasion 'planned since April'

by Alan Philps

The Russian invasion of Georgia was not a spontaneous response to what Moscow called “genocide” in South Ossetia but had been planned in detail since April, according to Russia’s leading independent defence analyst.

The plans all but ensured that fighting would break out before the end of August, though the exact timing depended on how readily the Georgian government could be provoked into starting it, Pavel Felgenhauer states in a new analysis of the conflict.

It is generally agreed that the spark for the war was the Nato summit meeting in Bucharest in April at which Georgia was promised eventual membership of the western alliance, in the teeth of opposition from the Russians.

According to Mr Felgenhauer, Vladimir Putin, who was president of Russia at the time but now serves as prime minister, set in motion a range of measures to support the two separatist territories in Georgia – South Ossetia and Abkhazia – and prepare for a military incursion.

By the start of August, Russian military engineers repaired the railway linking Russia to Abkhazia, allowing the sudden appearance of tanks and other heavy military equipment that was later used to attack and loot the Georgian army base at Senaki, Mr Felgenhauer wrote in Novaya Gazeta, one of the few Moscow newspapers outside the control of the Kremlin.

In South Ossetia, as the Russian-backed separatists stepped up attacks on Georgian police and military, the Russian army began to bring in some heavy weapons to supplement their existing, lightly armed troops who were there as internationally sanctioned peacekeepers.

Russia’s Black Sea fleet, as well as paratroopers and marines, were mobilised in the area for summer exercises titled “Kavkaz-2008”, which concluded on Aug 2.

The incursion had to start by the end of August, as the troops could not be kept on full alert endlessly and the pass through the Caucasus Mountains to South Ossetia would be snowed in by October, leaving only the Roki tunnel, which is so narrow it is reduced to one-way traffic when heavy military equipment is brought in.

Mr Felgenhauer said that, if the Georgian army was not provoked to attack South Ossetia, then the Russians would ensure that fighting broke out in Abkhazia, with the separatists trying to take the Kodori Gorge, the last remaining territory still under Georgian government control.

In the end, the Georgian president, Mikheil Saakashvili, responded to a series of shooting incidents and roadside bombs with a full-scale assault to recapture the South Ossetian capital, Tskhinvali.

Against this background, it is not surprising that Mr Putin, in Beijing for the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games, responded speedily to the Georgian assault with the accusation of “genocide” – the charge Nato used to justify its assault on Serbia after the Serbian army forced a mass exodus from the province of Kosovo in 1999. ....