The Russian-Georgian War

Preplanned in Moscow?

Wolodymyr Derzko

The Russian bear has awoken from its hibernation and the west should start to pay attention.

It’s been three weeks since Russia invaded the autonomous regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia in Georgia, on 8/08/08 -the start of the Olympic games.

It’s bad enough that many journalists have difficulty finding Georgia (let alone South Ossetia) on a map. What’s more disturbing is that few have any real understanding of how Russia really actually operates internally and are swallowing Russian wartime disinformation like water.

How did it all start? According to the Abkhazia Institute for Social and Economic Research, Oleg Panfilow wrote that Georgian President Saakashvili had no choice but to attack South Ossetia. “For more than 10 days Georgian territory was shelled from Ossetian positions. Russian peacekeepers watched it passively. Saakashvili called on Russia to calm down the leadership of South Osetia, threatened to use force, and finally it all boiled over ... Russia did nothing to diminish the tension. And that’s how Georgian military action in South Osetia turned into regular war.” said Panfilow

This is supported by a story in the Jamestown Monitor: The Russian – Georgian War was preplanned in Moscow. “The Ossetian separatists were provoking a conflict to give the Russian military a pretext for direct intervention. Late in the evening of August 7, a heavy mortar bombardment of Georgian villages near the South Ossetian capital of Tskhinvali provoked Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili to order a major assault. The night attack by Georgian troops outfitted with Western-made night-vision equipment flushed the Ossetian fighters out and Tskhinvali was overrun in the morning. To stop the Georgian offensive thousands of Russian troops with hundreds of pieces of armor invaded through the Roki tunnel and rushed forward. Russian jets began bombing Georgian military installations and cities”

The Georgian/Russian conflict is not the only Russian-influenced hotspot in the world. Some early weak signals of potential global Russian aggression include the following recent events:

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez said on Sunday that Russian President Dimitri Medvedev wants to send a Russian naval fleet to visit Venezuela and the Caribbean. Can we expect a renewed Russian ABM presence in Cuba?

This was confirmed by Deputy Duma speaker Vladimir Zhirinovskiy who told told ITAR-TASS that Moscow might consider the possibility of deploying its missiles “in Belarus, Cuba & Venezuela”.

In response to Poland, who agreed to host NATO’s defensive ballistic missile system and Ukraine’s announcement to share early warning radar capabilities with the EU and the USA, Russia is now considering arming its Baltic fleet with nuclear warheads for the first time since the cold war. Maybe the world should have insisted that Russia, instead of Ukraine give up its nuclear arsenal after the fall of the Soviet Union.

Now, the Ukrainian National Security and Defense Council is investigating claims that Russia has been illegally distributing Russian passports to Russian speaking sympathizers in Sevastopil, which Ukraine leases to the Russian Black Sea Fleet-- the same tactic that was used as a pretext for invading South Ossetia in Georgia. It raising fears that the Kremlin could again be fueling separatist sentiment in Crimea, as a prelude to possible military intervention.

According to Canadian expat Stephan Bandera, who interviewed Ukrainian vice admiral Boris Kozhin , 20,000 to 25,000 passports have been distributed. Bandera also warns: “Rumors abound that the [Russian] FSB is preparing cells of jihadists in the [Crimean] peninsula to provide the pretext for military annexation. It may well be in the realm of fantasy, but Moscow has resorted to similar trickery in the past. Recall the NKVD units that posed as UPA soldiers during WWII and killed innocent civilians disguised as [Ukrainian] nationalist freedom fighters.”

Former Defence Minister and Head of the National Security & Defence Council (RNBO), Anatoliy Hrytsenko said: “Ukraine should pay off its 1.3bn dollar debt to Russia as early as this year and then start charging the Russian fleet a real market-based rent for the base, in accordance with the basic agreements on the fleet’s stationing in Ukraine. Instead of writing off 97m dollars each year from the Ukrainian debt as rent payment, Russia would then have to pay Ukraine up to 1bn dollars a year. This would significantly boost the Crimean and Sevastopol budgets, Hrytsenko added.”

Bandera reminds us to expect to see more of Russia’s traditional tried & true intimidation tactics -pushing for a referendum on Crimean independence and joining Russia, introducing Russia’s ruble as the peninsula’s currency and proposing dual citizenship and of course, Moscow mayor Yuriy Luzhkov could certainly lead the “liberation charge”. And my favorite tactic, pensioners and the obligatory scarf-covered grandmothers demonstrating against NATO and world class Russian hacker attacks on government institutions and web sites prior to any actual physical attack.

I believe that Kyiv made the strategic mistake after the Chernobyl accident, and after Ukraine became independent, of not deliberately, resettling the majority of Ukrainian-speaking victims, into Crimea to balance out the population.