| | Who Attacked First in Georgia?
from TIA Daily
During the end of August, I ran into several articles that claimed that it was the Russians, not the Georgians who attacked first in South Ossetia. Several of them were public statements (and one was a private statement) by Prime Minister Mikheil Saakashvili that the Russians attacked first.
I did not write anything about any of these accounts because they offered no evidence of what actually happened, and only partial evidence on the state of mind within Saakashvili's government in the hours before the shooting started.
This article makes it clear what happened:
Western intelligence determined independently that two battalions of the [Russian] 135th Regiment moved through the tunnel to South Ossetia either on the night of Aug. 7 or the early morning of Aug. 8, according to a senior American official.
New Western intelligence also emerged last week showing that a motorized rifle element was assigned to a garrison just outside South Ossetia, on Russian territory, with the aim of securing the north end of the tunnel, and that it may have moved to secure the entire tunnel either on the night of Aug. 7 or early in the morning of Aug. 8, according to several American officials who were briefed on the findings.
Two battalions of the 135th Motorized Rifle Regiment (which would constitute over half the mobile fighting force of the entire regiment) were ordered to the frontier into the disputed Georgian territory of South Ossetia in the pre-dawn hours of August 7. When at least one of these two battalion crossed the frontier before sunrise, this violated two requirements of Russia's cease fire agreement with Georgia: that no Russian forces may be moved into the territory without advanced notification to the Georgian government and that no Russian forces may move at night.
They probably crossed the frontier because the unit commander, Col. Andrei Kazachenko, decided on his own initiative to order his troops and their armored personnel carriers to take up positions on both ends of the Roki Tunnel. The north end of the tunnel is on the frontier, so those forces might technically not have been inside South Ossetia. But the south end of the tunnel is several miles inside the disputed Georgian territory.
News of this announced Russian troop movement conducted under cover of darkness alarmed the government of Georgia—all the more so because it occurred at the main highway route from Russia into the South Ossettia, the route that leads to the provincial capital of Tskhinvali and to the strategic Georgian town of Gori, at the central crossroads of the country.
What the Georgian government knew of events came from intercepted cell phone calls between a South Ossetian border guard and the border patrol headquarters. We can assume that the South Ossetia border guard post was heavily infiltrated by local ethnic Russian militiamen who were collaborating with Russian troops and were personally acquainted with them. The relaxed and compliant manner of the border guard regarding the dozens of BMP armored personnel carriers—which mount guided anti-tank rockets and a 100 mm high-velocity anti-tank cannon—packed with hundreds of Russia soldiers that were milling about the entrance to the Roki Tunnel leaves no doubt about the loyalty of the border guards at the tunnel and his superiors back at headquarters:
BORDER POST AT TUNNEL ENTRANCE: "The commander, a colonel, approached and said, 'The guys with you should check the vehicles.' Is that OK?"
SUPERIORS AT BORDER PATROL HEADQUARTERS asked who the colonel was.
BORDER POST AT TUNNEL ENTRANCE: "I don't know. Their superior, the one in charge there. The BMPs and other vehicles were sent here and they've crowded there. The guys are also standing around. And he said that we should inspect the vehicles. I don't know. And he went out."
A border guard guarding the border in this manner and talking about the arrival of a large mechanized infantry force as if they were expected must have further alarmed the government in Tbilisi. The Russians had coordinated with the pro-Russian South Ossetian militia the unscheduled nighttime arrival of large column of armor and troops at the border.
For the government in Tbilisi, the second intercepted cell phone call from the Roki Tunnel was all they needed to hear to reach what seemed to them to be the obvious conclusion.
SUPERIORS AT BORDER PATROL HEADQUARTERS: "Listen, has the armor arrived or what?"
BORDER POST AT TUNNEL ENTRANCE: "The armor and people"
SUPERIORS AT BORDER PATROL HEADQUARTERS: Have they had gone through?
BORDER POST AT TUNNEL ENTRANCE: "Yes, 20 minutes ago."
By 11:30 PM the next evening Georgian artillery opened fire on the Russian mechanized battalion stationed in Tskhinvali and moved into the capital with elements of three infantry brigades. This is probably as fast as the Georgian Army could assemble and mount a serious and coordinated counterattack to what the government in Tbilisi thought was a full mechanized regiment of Russian invaders inside South Ossetia.
Based on the inadequacy of the Russian forces on hand in the region and the number of top Russian military and civilian officials who were out of position, it is clear that the Russian government was not planning an invasion of Georgia. When war erupted, it took two days for the Russians to fly in two regiments of paratroopers and get them into battle.
What happened is that Col. Andrei Kazachenko decided to use almost the entire mobile force of the 135th Regiment to support what would have been a normal rotation; replacing one of his battalions in Tskhinvali with another. During a period of heightened tensions, the Colonel probably thought it was a good idea to use a third battalion, positioned at the south end of the Roki Tunnel, to provide force protection during the movement of the relief battalion through the tunnel and the constricted valley terrain of the highway south of the tunnel.
Thus, there is considerable truth in the claim by a senior Russian military official, General Uvarov that the Georgians acted rashly and without a clear understanding of their own intelligence. At a tactical level, this was an accidental war.
But at a strategic level, the war occurred because the government in Tbilisi saw and understood the danger of a string of malevolent events. The return to dictatorship by Putin's regime, Russia's resurgence as a world power as the world's top oil exporter, Russia's extensive and continuing agitation inside two Georgian provinces, and Russia's attempt to annex the two provinces by incrementally giving more and more residents Russian passports and by incrementally placing more and more units of the Russian Army on their soil as bogus "peacekeeping" forces—all while passing more and more guns to ethnic Russian militias hostile to Tbilisi.
Thus the account of deputy assistant secretary of state for the Caucasus, Matthew J. Bryza, accurately recalls the very reasonable assumption in Tbilisi that Russia had decided to dispense with the policy of incremental occupation and annexation and was moving large formations of troops to swallow South Ossetia in one quick gulp:
During the height of all of these developments, when I was on the phone with senior Georgian officials, they sure sounded completely convinced that Russian armored vehicles had entered the Roki Tunnel, and exited the Roki Tunnel, before and during the cease-fire.
I said, under instructions, that we urge you not to engage these Russians directly.
[Georgia's foreign minister Eka Tkeshelashvili] sounded completely convinced, on a human level, of the Russian presence. "Under these circumstances," she said, "We have to defend our villages."
The fact was that the Russians were maintaining their policy of incremental occupation and annexation of South Ossetia, but were doing it in the usual crude, clumsy, ham-fisted, and intimidating style of Russia. But in mounting a full military counter-strike to answer what, in fact was only a heavy-handed method of troop rotation, the Georgian government was not being impulsive. They weren't reacting out of bare fear. They were reacting to years of strategic aggression.
The old saw applies to Georgia: "Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you." Hundreds of years of invasions have conditioned every small nation that borders Russia to be paranoid. And that does not mean that Russia isn't out to get them.
—Jack Wakeland
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