A Little War That Shook the World: Georgia, Russia, and the Future of the West

by Ronald D. Asmus, Strobe Talbott (Preface by)

Overview

The brief war between Russia and Georgia in August 2008 seemed to many like an unexpected shot out of the blue that was gone as quickly as it came. Former Assistant Deputy Secretary of State Ronald Asmus contends that it was a conflict that was prepared and planned for some time by Moscow, part of a broader strategy to send a message to the United States: that Russia is going to flex its muscle in the twenty-first century. A Little War that Changed the World is a fascinating look at the breakdown of relations between Russia and the West, the decay and decline of the Western Alliance itself, and the fate of Eastern Europe in a time of economic crisis.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780230102286
Publisher:	St. Martin's Press
Publication date:	03/26/2024
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	269
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Ronald Asmus is executive director of the Brussels-based Transatlantic Center and responsible for Strategic Planning at the German Marshall Fund of the United States. He is the former deputy assistant secretary of state for European Affairs during President Clinton's second term. He has published numerous essays over the years on US-European relations, including in Foreign Affairs, Survival, the American Interest and Policy Review. He is the author of Opening Nato's Door, a contributor to The Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and TheNew Republic, and others, and is a commentator in both the American and European news media. He lives in Brussels, Belgium.

Deadly Gambits: The Reagan Administration and the Stalemate in Nuclear Arms Control (1984); At the Highest Levels: The Inside Story of the End of the Cold War (1993), written with Michael Beschloss; The Russia Hand: A Memoir of Presidential Diplomacy (2002); and The Great Experiment: The Story of Ancient Empires, Modern States, and the Quest for a Global Nation (2008). A former Time columnist and Washington bureau chief, Talbott served as deputy secretary of state for seven years and was the architect of the Clinton administration’s policy toward Russia and the other states of the former Soviet Union. He translated and edited two volumes of Nikita Khrushchev’s memoirs in the early 1970s and founded the Yale Center for the Study of Globalization in 2001. Talbott currently lives in Washington, DC.
 

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A Little War That Shook The World

Georgia, Russia, and the Future of the West

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By Ronald D. Asmus

Palgrave Macmillan

Copyright © 2010 Ronald D. Asmus
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-230-10228-6

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CHAPTER 1

THE DECISION

Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili put down the phone. It was 2335 the night of August 7 in Tbilisi. He had just given the order for his armed forces to attack what his intelligence had reported to be a column of Russian forces moving from the small South Ossetian town of Java just south of the Russian-Georgian border toward the city of Tskhinvali, the capital of the small separatist enclave, as well as Russian forces coming through the Roki Tunnel on the Russian-Georgian border into Georgia. He had also ordered his armed forces to suppress the shelling by South Ossetian militia of Georgian villages in that province that were under the control of Georgian peacekeepers and police. That shelling had been taking place on and off for the previous week, but it had resumed and escalated that evening in spite of a unilateral ceasefire he had ordered. Georgian civilians and peacekeepers had been wounded and killed. He paused, picked up the phone again, and gave a third command: "Minimize civilian casualties."

Saakashvili had decided to go to war. It was a momentous decision, one that the EU's Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on the Conflict in Georgia (IIFFMCG), headed by Ambassador Heidi Tagliavini, would subsequently judge to be unjustifiable under international law. It would not only leave the future of Georgia hanging in the balance but would push Russia and the West to the brink of their biggest crisis since Communism's collapse twenty years earlier. The previous evening Georgia had intercepted cell phone conversations of South Ossetian border guards discussing the fact that Russian border guards had taken control of the Roki Tunnel just south of the Georgian-Russian border and that a Russian military column had passed through around 0400. Interior Minister Ivane "Vano" Merabishvili was in a late-night meeting when the news came through and immediately informed Saakashvili. How large a column had been involved was unclear. The Roki Tunnel is almost four kilometers long, and one of the border guards had claimed that "the tunnel is full." Georgian intelligence had a source on the ground at the south end of the tunnel that claimed to have seen "150 pieces of armor," but the source was not a trained expert in military reconnaissance.

The intercepts also mentioned the name of the colonel who commanded the 693rd regiment of the Nineteenth division of the Russian Fifty-eighth army. That unit was not authorized to be in Georgia. Subsequent reports confirmed that elements of the 135th regiment were also there. Georgian intelligence estimated that a Russian infantry battalion may have been involved—i.e., about 550 men—but no one knew for sure. Around the same time, Georgian peacekeepers observed Russian forces moving south along the bypass road from Java in the direction of Tskhinvali. Georgian peacekeeping commander Brigadier General Mamuka Kurashvili phoned his Russian counterpart and the overall commander of the peace-keeping forces, Major General Marat Kulakhmetov, to ask what those forces were doing, adding that there appeared to be heavy artillery. The Russian side promised to look into it and call back. They never did. It was another worrying sign that Moscow was up to something.

Georgia had stepped up its reconnaissance efforts throughout the day as Tbilisi scrambled to figure out where these forces had gone and what they were up to. The Georgian military had many deficiencies, but Tbilisi had invested in long-distance reconnaissance capabilities, including thermal night vision equipment. Saakashvili's final order to go to war was triggered by several factors—the lack of any Ossetian or Russian response to his unilateral ceasefire, the renewed shelling of Georgian villages that evening, and the movement of Russian forces the previous evening, as well as fresh intelligence indicating that additional Russian forces were poised to move through the Roki Tunnel after dark. But the final straw was a Georgian reconnaissance unit's visual confirmation of a military column moving from Java toward Tskhinvali. Based on the numbers and type of equipment in the column—tanks, armored personnel carriers, and artillery—the Georgians concluded that these forces were neither South Ossetian nor North Caucasian "volunteers." It was the Russian army. It confirmed Saakashvili's suspicion that his country was being invaded by Moscow and triggered his late-night decision to fight back.

The Russian Fifty-eighth Army, Moscow's main military force in the Northern Caucasus, was known for its brutality in the Chechen wars. In the weeks prior to the invasion it had conducted major summer exercises called "Kavkaz 2008" in North Ossetia, north of the Georgian border. The official scenario for that exercise was the "detecting, blocking, and eliminating of terrorist groups" in the local mountainous terrain. The force included some 700 combat vehicles, fighter aircraft, and part of the Black Sea fleet. Such a force was hardly of great utility in fighting terrorists in the mountains, but it was ideal for a conventional invasion of a neighbor. In fact, this exercise was a trial run for the invasion about to take place. The exercise scenario involved Russian forces having to intervene in a fictitious breakaway former Soviet republic to protect Russian peacekeepers and citizens. It was de facto a war game to invade Georgia. Russian soldiers participating in the exercise had even been given briefing materials in advance that said, "Soldier, know your potential enemy!" The enemy those materials identified was Georgia.

Following the completion of the exercises, many of the units lingered in place rather than returning to their home bases. A sizeable Russian force was gathered north of the Roki Tunnel. By the evening of August 5, nearly 12,000 soldiers, along with their armor and artillery, were deployed and ready to strike Georgia. Three days earlier, on August 2, Nikolai Pankov, the Russian deputy minister of defense, and Anatoly Khrulyev, the deputy chief of intelligence and commander in chief of the Fifty-eighth Army, had visited South Ossetia to meet with the South Ossetian leadership as well as the commander of the Russian and North Ossetian peacekeeping forces—reportedly to finalize the plan of action for these units.

Moscow has officially claimed that its armed forces only entered Georgia on the afternoon of August 8 at 1400. That claim, however, is simply not credible. Exactly when regular Russian units began infiltrating across the border and how many had already entered South Ossetian territory illegally before the evening of August 7 is still unclear and is passionately disputed. Although both ends of the Roki Tunnel are on Georgian territory, Moscow controlled it and had repeatedly refused to allow international monitors to observe who was passing through. Moscow would claim that its forces moved through the tunnel only on the afternoon of August 8. Andrei Illiaronov, in an exhaustive study of Russia's war preparations, has argued that some 1,200 Russian soldiers along with medical and communication units were already in South Ossetia illegally by August 7, with another 12,000 troops poised "to be able to immediately cross the border to provide assistance to the peacekeepers in South Ossetia," as one official put it. Subsequent sources and press reports during and after the war by journalists in South Ossetia also suggest that elements of the 135th and 693rd Regiments of the Fifty-eighth Army and the Twenty-second Special Forces Brigade as well as several tank units had already moved into South Ossetia between August 2 and the evening of August 7—and some of those units started fighting the Georgians early on August 8 when they entered Tskhinvali.

This was in addition to the North Ossetian, Chechen, and Cossack "volunteers" who had been officially mobilized by Moscow and registered by Russian military authorities before they were sent across the border, where a number of them were assigned to the North Ossetian peacekeeping battalion starting on August 3. They were, however, anything but peaceful. They were ideal for ethnic cleansing, which is what they would soon be used for. After the war was over, the Russian military paper Krasnaya Zvezda carried an article about a wounded Russian captain from the 135th Motorized Rifle Regiment who admitted that his battalion was already in South Ossetia on August 7 and was sent to Tskhinvali on August 8, where he was subsequently wounded in the fighting. As always, it is the cover-up that is most telling. After the article attracted too much attention, the text was first changed, then the officer was re-interviewed and suggested that his forces had only entered Georgia on August 8; finally he disappeared from public view.

While Georgia had de facto lost control over large swaths of South Ossetia after the initial fighting in the early 1990s, this was still officially sovereign Georgian territory. Russia was officially allowed a limited contingent of "peacekeepers" on Georgian soil in the conflict zones of South Ossetia and Abkhazia in accordance with ceasefire agreements reached with the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) and the United Nations in the early 1990s. However, the nature and equipment of these troops was required to be limited in accord with a peacekeeping mission. They were supposed to be part of a separate chain of command. Any rotation or reinforcement of such forces was supposed to be announced thirty days in advance. In reality, Moscow had long flouted these rules. These Russian troop reinforcements and movements were in violation of the existing agreements and therefore illegal.

Saakashvili had been receiving intelligence throughout the day on August 7 about Russian and other units gathering both north of the Roki Tunnel and around the Ugardanta military base outside of Java in South Ossetia. That base was supposed to have been disbanded years earlier, but Moscow had instead renovated it over the previous year, and it was now capable of holding and staging much larger forces. That, too, hardly seemed a coincidence. Already in mid-July, Georgian intelligence had received reports from friendly Western services of additional Russian fighter aircraft being moved to North Ossetia. On the morning of August 7, they received a report that on August 4 or 5 Moscow had pre-deployed additional military aircraft from the Ivanovo air base outside Moscow to the Mozdok air base in North Ossetia. That deployment included an airborne command plane capable of directing an air war against Georgia called the Russian A–50. The Georgians were also receiving information that part of the Russian Black Sea fleet based in Sevastopol had left port several days earlier and was preparing for a major operation. It, too, had prepositioned itself for this invasion.

It was a chaotic day, and the Georgians were trying to comprehend exactly what was happening on their northern border—and why. The combination of ground forces gathering and airpower being moved into position looked increasingly ominous. The big question in Saakashvili's mind was whether the Russian forces gathering up north would remain there or would start to march south toward the city of Tskhinvali. And if they moved south, was their goal to take those villages and the territory Georgia controlled around Tskhinvali or much more? Was this just another attempt to pressure Saakashvili or was Russia actually preparing to invade Georgia? When Saakashvili tried to place a call to Russian president Dmitry Medvedev to discuss what was happening, he was turned down.

As the signs of Russian forces moving into South Ossetia multiplied, the Georgian president faced a choice fraught with peril—either to let it happen or to try to fight back. His Western allies had repeatedly urged him not to get into a fight with Russia—no matter what. But in the path of those Russian forces lay the Georgian villages in the Didi Liakhvi valley as well as the Tbilisi-supported alternative South Ossetian government in the village of Kurta. Those villages not only contained thousands of Georgian citizens that Tbilisi was pledged to protect, but Kurta also was the heart and soul of Georgia's own strategy to win over the hearts and minds of South Ossetians through "soft power." If Russian forces swept through those villages, it could lead to another wave of bloody ethnic cleansing and shatter Tbilisi's strategy for resolving the South Ossetian conflict peacefully and on its terms. Such an outcome, Saakashvili believed, would be such a political debacle that his government would not survive.

But Saakashvili also had bigger worries. He had always believed—and openly told visitors, including this author—that he did not think Moscow would ever make a military move just for South Ossetia. The tiny enclave was simply not worth it. If Moscow moved into South Ossetia, he assumed it would be a precursor for a broader assault with the goal of taking Tbilisi. South of Tskhinvali lay flat and open terrain from there to Tbilisi. So the question in his mind was: Would those Russian forces stop in the South Ossetian capital or simply continue on to the Georgian capital and go after him? It was hardly a secret that the Kremlin was trying to oust him. Kremlin pundits had hinted darkly on television about assassinating him. Moscow had taken a variety of political and economic steps, both overt and covert, to try to destabilize his government. Putin had personally warned Saakashvili on more than one occasion that his pro-Western course would have consequences.

None of the threats had intimidated Saakashvili—up to this point. But he was jumpy. Georgian-Russian relations had been increasingly on the edge of conflict since the spring, when Moscow, in the wake of Kosovo independence in February and the NATO Bucharest summit, had increased the pressure by taking steps that amounted to a creeping annexation of the two separatist enclaves. Moscow had also been ramping up its own illegal military preparations, using the cover of its alleged peacekeeping role to illegally modernize infrastructure, deploy additional forces, and further arm separatist forces who were making preparations that would subsequently facilitate an invasion. Most of that effort had been focused in Abkhazia, where tension had intensified throughout the spring and summer. At times, Moscow even seemed to want to flaunt its breaking of the rules—for example, making no effort to hide from the Western media the illegal entry of Russian troops and armor into the separatist province in the early summer.

In Georgia's eyes, what the Russians were planning was obvious. Moscow was trying to de facto annex these two disputed enclaves bit by bit in slow motion—testing to see if the West would protest and daring Tbilisi to try to stop them. The Western policy response had been, as far as Georgia was concerned, limp and half-hearted. Tbilisi's allies urged restraint on both sides and repeatedly warned Saakashvili not to get into a fight with Russia but instead to rely on diplomacy to de-escalate the situation. But diplomacy was not working or stopping what Russia was doing on the ground to turn the status quo against Tbilisi. Georgia had tried its own secret diplomacy with Russia but failed to make any headway as well. In Tbilisi's view, diplomacy was failing and Moscow was consolidating a new partition of the country that would render nominal Georgian territorial integrity theoretical and meaningless. In doing so, it was breaking almost every rule in the book in full view of the international community. And it was simultaneously building its military option—its hammer to crush Georgia if Tbilisi dared to move to stop it.

August was known as the shooting season in the Southern Caucasus. It was something of a ritual for there to be final exchanges of artillery fire between South Ossetian and Georgian forces in late July or early August before the summer break settled in. The normal pattern during the previous summers had been that the South Ossetians would start shelling, the Georgians would retaliate, and then, after a day or two of exchanges, one side, usually but not always Georgia, would back down. One exception had been in 2004, when the Georgian side had in fact escalated and fought back, only to suffer significant casualties. It was a lesson that Tbilisi did not forget and it became much more cautious in subsequent years. In the summer of 2007, two Russian aircraft had bombed a Georgian radar site near the town of Tsitelubani on the border of the South Ossetian conflict zone. The missile failed to fully detonate, thus allowing Western experts to confirm its Russian origins in spite of Moscow's denials.

When the shooting began between South Ossetian and Georgian forces on July 29, 2008, many observers—both inside and outside Georgia itself—initially dismissed it as more of the same. It soon became clear, however, that this summer's pattern of fighting was more worrying. When South Ossetian paramilitary forces opened fire on Georgian positions and villages on July 29, those barrages were more systematic and lethal than in previous summers. They lasted through the day and the evening and included 100 mm and 120 mm artillery—heavier weapons officially banned from the zone that had never been used previously in the conflict zone and were many times more powerful than any used before. These new weapons could have only been supplied to the South Ossetians through Russia. On August 4 the Russian peacekeeping commander, Major General Marat Kulakhmetov, confirmed that large-caliber artillery banned under the existing agreements had been used against Georgian villages. Although he refused to identify the perpetrators, the Georgians knew who was behind the attacks. They had intercepted phone calls showing that Russian and North Ossetian peace-keepers were collaborating with local South Ossetian militia to target Georgians and then hide the evidence.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from A Little War That Shook The World by Ronald D. Asmus. Copyright © 2010 Ronald D. Asmus. Excerpted by permission of Palgrave Macmillan.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents

Contents

Preface,
Map of Georgia,
Introduction,
1. The Decision,
2. From Cold to Hot War in the Caucasus,
3. The Kosovo Precedent,
4. Diplomatic Shootout in Bucharest,
5. Diplomacy Fails,
6. The Battle,
7. Ceasefire,
8. Georgia, Russia, and the Future of the West,
A Note on Bibliography and Sources,
Notes,
Acknowledgments,
Index,