TBILISI, Georgia — The Russian diplomat said he couldn’t make it. He had a flat tire. The Georgian official in charge of bringing breakaway regions back into the fold was incredulous.
Temuri Yakobashvili had driven up to South Ossetia from the Georgian capital to begin Russian-mediated peace talks to end months of escalating fighting in the disputed pro-Moscow republic. But the Russian hadn’t shown up.
“Can’t you change the tire?” Yakobashvili says he asked Uri Popov, the Russian diplomat. No, he replied. The spare was flat, too.
Fewer than 12 hours later, war between Russia and Georgia began, a conflict that has roiled the volatile, oil-rich Caucasus, raised tensions between Moscow and the West and nearly crushed this small U.S. ally.
But long before that flat tire, both sides had set their course for conflict, analysts and officials in Washington, Tbilisi and Moscow say: A combination of Russia’s relentless drive toward confrontation and Georgian hubris made last week’s warfare inevitable.
To some observers, the course was set after the 2004 election of Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili. On Russia’s southern border, Georgia had been under Moscow’s sway for centuries. Now, the U.S.-educated Saakashvili was turning the country into a staunchly nationalist, pro-American laboratory for Velvet Revolution-style agitation.
A trove of evidence strongly suggests that Russia was preparing the logistics for war well before Aug. 7. As long as three years ago, diplomats, officials and analysts say, Moscow started waging a multipronged propaganda, military and economic campaign against Georgia as it moved hurriedly and provocatively into the Western sphere — and possibly even into NATO, Russia’s Cold War nemesis, itself.
“The political decision was made in April,” said Pavel Felgenhauer, a military analyst in Moscow who writes for the Jamestown Foundation, a Washington think tank, and Russian publications. “It was final. Preparations were being in place for a year beforehand.”
Overly confident
Many observers say the Georgians, with the United States in their corner, became overly confident of their capabilities.
“These are the most romantic people in the world. They’re very gallant, in the stupid sense,” said Bruce Jackson, a close administration ally who has worked extensively with Saakashvili and other leaders in the emerging democracies of the former Soviet bloc. “Do they really listen? They’re very much ‘the charge of the light brigade’ people. It has a lot to do with personal honor.”
At any moment, analysts say, Saakashvili might have staved off a full-on military attack by heeding Moscow’s warnings and renouncing or at least qualifying his country’s desire to join NATO.
Instead, Saakashvili reportedly made jokes about Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s height.
Propelled to power in 2004 after the so-called Rose Revolution, Saakashvili immediately began to push his country headlong toward the West, purging the Soviet-era bureaucracy, liberalizing the economy and cozying up to the U.S. by sending 2,000 troops to Iraq. In the spring of 2005, he and thousands of his countrymen proudly cheered President Bush when the American leader visited Tbilisi and said the United States would support their progress toward U.S.-style democracy.
“Everyone was expecting that something would happen because of Saakashvili’s Western ways,” said one European diplomat here in the Georgian capital.
Analysts noted a stepping up of anti-Georgian propaganda campaign in the Russian media about three years ago. In the weeks before the war, Russian media publicized opinion polls depicting tiny Georgia as Russia’s worst enemy.
“They always mention the ethnicity of Georgian criminals,” said Nini Gogiberidze, a Georgian scholar of international relations who monitored Russian media. “They never mention the ethnicity of Ukrainian or Kazakh criminals.”
Tensions increased in 2005 after Georgia expelled two Russian diplomats it accused of espionage. In retaliation, Russia deported Georgians living in Moscow, sending them back to Tbilisi in cargo planes.
In the middle of the cold winter of 2006, South Ossetian separatists who have been agitating against Georgia for a decade and a half allegedly blew up the gas pipeline to Georgia, leaving the country without electricity or heat for two weeks.
Analysts note numerous hints that Russia was preparing the political groundwork for a conflict.
Russia started issuing passports to residents of South Ossetia. In March, Moscow rejected sanctions on separatists in the breakaway Georgian republic of Abkhazia proposed by the Commonwealth of Independent States, a loose confederation of former Soviet republics. The Russian Parliament passed a resolution recognizing the demands of South Ossetian and Abkhaz separatists.
Kosovo enrages Russia
Russians were enraged in February when the West recognized Kosovo’s independence from Moscow’s ally Serbia over its strenuous objections. Russians interpreted the move as hypocritical. “If the West could begin redrawing the map of Europe in this day and age,” said a Western diplomat, “why couldn’t Russia?”
Russia’s preparations for a possible war began in April, according to analysts and Western diplomats, after Georgia and Ukraine, backed by the U.S., pushed to begin preparations to join NATO. Some called that a decisive factor in the decision to escalate the conflict.
“There were so many times that they could have publicly renounced their desire to join NATO,” Felgenhauer said. “That could have been the beginning of the solving of the problem.”
On April 30, Russians downed an unmanned Georgian drone flying over Abkhazia. A week before the conflict, Russians completed a major railway upgrade project they’d begun a month earlier in Abkhazia. To experts of the Russian military, this was a key development.
“I know what railroad means for the Russian military in terms of military preparations,” Felgenhauer said. “That’s the only way we can move heavy equipment from one theater to another theater.”
At the same time, Russians ran a military exercise in the Caucasus. It was focused on sharpening counterinsurgency skills, the European diplomat said. Among the units involved was the 58th Army, which ended up leading the attack into Georgia.
Clashes erupt
In South Ossetia, which is largely ethnic Ossetian but about one-third ethnic Georgian, clashes began to erupt between the groups.
“There was extensive exchange of fire, kidnapping on both sides,” said Alexander Rondeli, president at the Georgian Foundation for Strategic and International Studies. “Russians turned a blind eye to their allies. Georgians turned a blind eye to their allies.”
A bomb blast killed an Ossetian official. An assassin tried kill the leader of South Ossetia’s Georgian community.
“After this,” the European diplomat said, “everything started to snowball.”
Saakashvili’s behavior and inflammatory rhetoric didn’t help matters. Retaking controls of the breakaway regions had always been part of his agenda. He tripled the country’s military budget, to $3.2 billion, and populated his government and security forces with U.S. and Israeli advisers.
“A number of powerful advisers and structures around President Mikheil Saakashvili appear increasingly convinced a military operation in Abkhazia is feasible and necessary,” the International Crisis Group, a Brussels, Belgium-based advocacy group, reported in June. “The Georgians have been warned by their Western partners against attempting a military solution.”
At a conference in Dubrovnik over the July 4 weekend, Jackson and Daniel Fried, the U.S. State Department’s top European hand, pleaded with the Georgian president to abandon hopes of defeating Russian troops.
“You are not in NATO. There is no Article V commitment. If you get into this, you’re in it yourself,” Jackson recalled Fried telling Saakashvili. “Nobody’s coming. There is no cavalry.”
Jackson said he was less diplomatic. “I went further than Fried could go, and I pointed out that Georgia hasn’t won a war against anybody for 2,000 years,” Jackson said. “Let’s not kid ourselves. You’re not Chechens.”
In mid-July, just weeks before the conflict, U.S. Marines and Georgian soldiers staged a military exercise at a former Soviet base in Georgia. In retrospect, some people wonder if this was a mistake, perhaps giving Georgians the impression they were more powerful than they were.
“Did somebody misinterpret that?” said one U.S. military official in Washington, D.C. “There are, in the intelligence community, (efforts) to say: ‘OK, how did this unfold?’ ”
At 7 p.m. on Aug. 7, Saakashvili appeared on television to order Georgian forces to hold their fire. Then reports came in that Ossetians had overrun at least two Georgian enclaves. The fighting resumed more ferociously.
Warning of a trap
According to a senior U.S. official, the U.S. State Department’s Fried called Saakashvili and tried to convince him that the attacks by South Ossetian irregulars were a trap. But as night fell, reports came in that Russian troops were on the move. Georgia decided to respond aggressively.
“The whole world community tried to convince Georgia not to do this,” the European diplomat said. “But someone crossed the border.”
Within hours, war engulfed the southern Caucasus. The U.S.-trained and -equipped Georgian troops began defeating the Russian troops.
“The first 12 to 20 hours, Georgia had the momentum,” the European diplomat said. “It controlled almost all of South Ossetian territory.”
But Russian troops and fighter jets began swarming into South Ossetia, Abkhazia and ultimately Georgia. Russians quickly dispatched two elite special forces units, although independent analyst say it’s difficult to conclude whether the Russian commandos were in place coincidentally because of the previous week’s military exercise or brought in specifically for a war.
“It was a huge miscalculation on the part of our government,” said Tornike Sharashenidze, an analyst at the Georgian Center of Public Affairs. “They underestimated the possible reaction.”
The Pentagon’s efforts to halt the Russian advance started in earnest Aug. 8. U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates tried to persuade the Georgians to stand down. He also spoke with Anatoliy Serdyukov, the colorless former furniture salesman who became Russia’s defense minister last year.
“I will tell you that Minister Serdyukov told me that the Russians have no intention of going into Georgia,” Gates recalled.
But many observers say there was little the Georgians, Russians or Americans could do by then. The trap had been sprung, and Saakashvili seemed more than willing to take the bait.
“It’s been clear that Russians have tried to create a situation where the Georgians would make a mistake,” a ranking European diplomat said. “The Russian action and the war was of course not an improvisation. These plans had been made some time ago.”
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