Posts by GordonHahn:

    The Russian-American ‘Reset’, NATO Expansion, and the Making of the Ukrainian Crisis

    February 12th, 2016

    By Gordon Hahn.

     

    An emerging myth–one being put forward by both present and former U.S. government officials, the DC think tank community, and the media–is that NATO expansion had nothing to do with the making of the Ukrainian crisis and civil war. Nothing could be further from the truth. A main pillar of that argument is that NATO expansion was off the agenda for the entirety of the Barack Obama administration. This is as far from the truth as the general proposition on causality. In fact, throughout the Barack Obama administration both the administration and the NATO apparatus were hard at work behind the scenes to bring both Ukraine and Georgia into NATO, using the West’s entire institutional infrastructure to ready those countries for NATO membership. Let’s take a look at the facts in some detail.

    NATO’s Stealth Expansion

    Thus, Obama administration officials, such as US ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul, have claimed that NATO expansion was kept off the administration’s agenda, and therefore any Russian complaints addressed to the administration in connection with the making of the Ukraine crisis or otherwise are groundless. For example, McFaul wrote: “And the dreaded issue of NATO expansion that has somehow now provoked Russia into grabbing Crimea? It was not a problem during the reset. Aside from the addition of Croatia and Albania in 2009, two countries far away from Russia, NATO did not expand in the Obama-Medvedev era. Despite pressure from George W. Bush at the 2008 NATO Bucharest summit, other NATO allies refused to allow Georgian membership. After Russia’s invasion of Georgia in August 2008, the issue within the alliance died.”[1]

    McFaul has omitted two issues here. First, he gravely obfuscates the causality chain and simultaneously sets up a strawman and inference that Moscow or anyone else for that matter has stated that NATO expansion was a direct cause of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s Crimean annexation and reunification with Russia. A short list of the things McFaul leaves out between Crimea and NATO expansion (depending on which round he is talking about, I will set the bar high and use the last in 2009) would include: the West’s rejection of President Dmitrii Medvedev’s proposal to negotiate a new European security architecture; the EU’s Eastern European Partnership that excluded Russia; the EU’s refusal to engage Russia in talks on the EU-Ukraine Association Agreement (EUUAA) in order to minimize the market upheavals it might create in Russia and the Eurasian Economic Union; the military clauses in the draft EUUAA (see more below), the violation of the Helsinki Final Act’s clauses against interference in the domestic politics of member-states that occurred when US Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, US Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt, and other US and Western officials directly intervened on Maidan Square to encourage protesters to continue demonstrating; the opposition’s violation of the 20 February agreement on ending the conflict between Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovich, mostly moderates from the Maidan movement, Germany, France, Poland and Russia; Washington’s and Brussels’ acquiescence or endorsement of that violation and the illegal seizure of power by the opposition using violence; the likelihood and even certainty that the new largely anti-Russian regime would seek membership NATO despite opposition to such in southeastern Ukraine, especially in Crimea; Crimea’s being home to Russia’s Black Sea Fleet and overall strategic importance for Russian national security; and the continuing efforts in Washington and Brussels throughout the Obama administration to prepare Ukraine for NATO membership.

    In addition, McFaul sets up a strawman. No one has ever made the argument that NATO expansion was the immediate cause of Putin’s move in Crimea. The argument, or at least my argument and long-standing prediction, is that NATO expansion would encroach on Russia’s sense of its sphere of influence and national security and thus provoke conflict. This precisely what happened in 2014. With the ouster of Yanukovich, Moscow had good reason to believe that the Maidan revolution would lead to Ukraine’s membership in NATO and loss of access to the Black Sea Fleet’s naval base in Sevastopol, Crimea. This on top of everything else, including the inevitable Georgian membership in NATO, would mean Russia’s loss of dominance in the Black Sea region and a blow to its ability to defend itself against NATO in the event of a crisis of the very kind that had just occurred in Ukraine as a result in part of other U.S. policies such as democracy-promotion, regime change, and color revolutionism.

    McFaul’s more important omission is that at its April 2008 Bucharest summit, NATO issued an official statement over Russia’s and in particular President Vladimir Putin’s explicitly stated strong objections that both Georgia and Ukraine will someday be NATO members. To be sure, as McFaul notes, was still during the George Bush administration. However, NATO reiterated no less than four times at no less than four Obama-era NATO summits that both Ukraine and Georgia will join NATO in the future. NATO’s Bucharest declaration on Ukrainian and Georgian membership would be restated officially by NATO at its 2009, 2010, 2012 and 2014 summits – the last taking place at the height of the Ukrainian crisis.[2]

    Already in 2009—months into the Obama administration’s first year—NATO deepened its ‘distinctive partnership’ with Ukraine and the NATO-Ukraine Commission established at the 1997 Madrid NATO summit. NATO’s 2009 ‘Declaration to Complement the Charter on a Distinctive Partnership between the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and Ukraine’ instituted a series of measures to assist “Ukraine’s efforts to take forward its political, economic, and defence-related reforms pertaining to its Euro-Atlantic aspirations for membership in NATO.”[3]

    The victory of the less pro-Western Yanukovich in the February 2010 presidential election put cold water on any near-term Ukrainian accession to NATO. From early in his election campaign Yanukovich asserted that Ukraine should remain a “non-aligned state” and multivectoral foreign policy. “We will initiate a new common marker between the European Union and the CIS states. The foreign policy priority will be restoration of the full-fledged partnership with Russia, as well as the development of mutually beneficial partnership with the United State, the EU all the key countries of the G20,” he noted in October 2009.[4] Ukraine’s cooperation with NATO had attained a level commensurate with public opinion and need not be deepened, Yanukovich stated: “The Ukrainian people don’t currently support Ukraine’s entry to NATO and this corresponds to the status that we currently have. We don’t want to join any military bloc.”[5] On the eve of the vote, he essentially reiterated this stance, saying Kiev’s relations with NATO were “well-defined” and that that there could be “no question of Ukraine joining NATO” in the “immediate future” though it could “emerge at some point” but would be decided by referendum.[6] In his February 25th inaugural address he repeated that he would pursue a strategy of a “non-aligned state.”[7] In Brussels, on March 1st during his first foreign trip as president, he told the European Commission that Kiev continue its participation in NATO’s various ‘outreach programs’ in addition to pursuing an EU association agreement and Ukrainian free trade and visa-free travel with Europe.[8]

    Thus, Ukraine would continue cooperatioin with NATO under the 2009 ‘Declaration to Complement the Charter on a Distinctive Partnership between the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and Ukraine’, the NUAP, successive annual national programs, seminars, and joint tactical and strategic exercises. On 24 June 2010, Ukraine’s government approved an action plan to implement its annual national program for cooperation with NATO for 2010, which included: participation of Ukrainian aviation and material in the transportation of cargo and personnel of NATO member-states’ armed forces and partners operating in NATO-led peacekeeping missions; continuation of Ukraine’s participation in the Kosovo peacekeeping mission; possible reinforcement of Ukrainian peacekeeping contingents in Iraq and Afghanistan; participation in a series of international NATO events organized by NATO; and training Ukrainian troops in the structures of NATO member-states.[9] Thus, in 2011 and subsequent years of Yanukovych’s tenure NATO held military exercises on Ukrainian territory.[10] In March 2012, Ukraine and NATO held joint security seminars and command-staff strategic exercises in preparing for the Euro 2012 European Football Championship in April 2012, involving five Ukrainian government ministries and agencies.[11] Ukrainian forces took part in NATO’s ‘Ocean Shield’, combating piracy of the coast of Somalia, by delegating a ship to the operation.[12] In June 2013, Yanukovych renewed the 2009 decree mandating Ukraine’s annual national programs with NATO, signaling his support for continued cooperation on the eve of the 2013-2014 crisis.[13] The purpose of all this joint activity was to strengthen the bond between the Ukrainian military and NATO and thereby destroy any remaining bonds between the former and the Russian military, given their many years as the Soviet military and early post-Soviet era ties.

    As the United States is a NATO member, the Obama administration can be presumed to have approved of the alliance’s adoption of this declaration and subsequent measures. This would have been clear to Moscow and consequently the Obama administration’s supposed silence on NATO expansion in its dealings with the Kremlin might appear as deception. Therefore, contrary to Ambassador McFaul’s assertion, Russian concerns about NATO expansion’s continuation or its connection with the making of the Ukraine crisis are far from groundless.

    At the same time as Yanukovych supported and even strengthened cooperation with NATO, he pushed through the Rada a law that codified Kiev’s non-aligned status. The June 2010 law removed mention of Ukraine’s “integration into Euro-Atlantic security and NATO membership” from the country’s national security doctrine and related documents and precluded Ukraine’s membership of any military alliance. The law, however, allowed for Ukraine’s integration into Europe and co-operation with military blocs such as NATO and the CSTO.[14] Therefore, despite Ukraine’s continuing and deepening involvement in alliance programs, NATO Assistant Secretary General for Defense Policy and Planning Jiri Sedivy seemed to sound a note of consternation with Kiev’s ambiguity when he told a meeting with Ukrainian reporters in May 2010: “It is an unprecedented experience for a country, which has been working in the frames of the Annual National Program, not to want to become NATO member.”[15] There can be little doubt that this reflected growing discomfort with Yanukovych in both Washington and Brussels. Indeed, in announcing Ukraine’s participation in operation ‘Ocean Shield’ in 2013, NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen stated that although NATO’s decision that Georgia and Ukraine will eventually join the alliance “still stands,” it fully respected Kiev’s non-alignment policy, adding that there was “serious concern” in about Ukraine’s use of “selective justice.”[16] The last was a reference to the October 2011 conviction of his former prime minister and 2010 presidential election runoff opponent, Yuliya Tymoshenko on charges of embezzlement and abuse of power, for which she was handed a seven-year prison term and ordered to pay the state $188 million allegedly lost as a result of her 2008 gas deal with Putin. In other words, despite Yanukovych’s acquiescence, if not instigation of Tymoshenko’s imprisonment, NATO was still willing to bring Ukraine into the institutions of the Western community of democracies.

    Washington’s and Brussels’s continuing pursuit of luring Ukraine into the Western alliance notwithstanding, the country itself remained not only opposed but also bitterly divided over the issue. The Western-funded Razumkov Center’s public opinion surveys show that from 2002 to 2008 the majority of Ukrainians were opposed to their country’s membership in NATO, but western Ukraine supported Ukrainian membership in NATO at levels of 48-75 percent, beginning at 69 percent in 2002 and ending at 61 percent in 2008. In the east and the south support for NATO membership was low, ranging from 42 percent in 2002 to 9 percent in 2008. In central Ukraine, support stood at 51 percent in 2002 but fell to 30 percent by 2008.[17] By contrast, despite or perhaps because of Yushchenko’s pro-Western policies, pro-Russian sentiment in southeastern Ukraine remained high by the end of his presidency. In an August 2011 opinion survey carried out in the regions of Odessa, Kherson, Mikolaiv, and Crimea were asked who would be Ukraine’s best ally over the next 5 years. Russia was chosen by 68.4 percent of respondents, the EU – 15.9 percent, China – 1.9 percent, and the US – 1.3 percent.[18]

    Indeed, throughout the entire post-Soviet period, including both the Yushchenko and Yanukovich administrations, a majority of Ukrainians remained opposed to the country joining NATO.[19] According to numerous independent polls conducted by various Ukrainian and foreign organizations between 2002 and 2013, Ukrainians’ support for NATO membership continuously remained low. A high of 32 percent in 2002 supported membership, with only 20 percent supporting it by 2013. Thus, the level of opposition rose, with 33 percent in 2002 opposing membership, with a large undecided response, and in 2013—on the eve of the scheduled EU association agreement signing and ensuing crisis—a hefty 66 percent rejecting Ukraine’s membership in NATO.[2o] A 2009 Pew Research poll showed 51 percent of Ukrainians opposed NATO membership, while only 28% supported it.[21] Even those most in favor of Ukrainian membership in NATO, including lobbyists of the OUN-UPA diaspora such as the intenslely anti-Russian Ukrainian nationalist Aleksandr Motyl, have acknowledged Ukrainian public opinion’s opposition to NATO membership throughout the post-Soviet period prior to the 2013-2014 crisis.[22] NATO itself admitted in 2011 that “some” polls showed less than 20 percent support for Ukraine joining NATO: “The greatest challenge for the (sic) Ukrainian-NATO relations lies in the perception of NATO among the Ukrainian people. NATO membership is not widely supported in Ukraine, with some polls suggesting less than 20% of Ukrainians back membership. NATO’s bombing of Belgrade was particularly unpopular in Ukraine.”[23] Changing this negative attitude of the population towards Ukrainian membership in NATO was the purpose of the NATO-Ukrainian information program noted above.

    Thus, NATO’s enlargement policy was clearly much more proactive than simply passively processing applications. NATO engaged in aggressive recruiting of new members through its establishment of various military-to-military aide programs often paired with prospective or actual membership in the European Union (EU) and in the aftermath of ‘color revolutions’ in Georgia, with the well-know disastrous result of misleading President Mikheil Saakashvili that Washington and Brussels had or would have his back when he assaulted Tskhinval, South Ossetiya on the evening of 7 August 2008 kicking off the Georgian-Ossetiyan/Russian war.

    Expanding NATO through the West’s Institutional Infrastructure: EU Expansion

    EU expansion became a second instrument by which Washington and Brussels bound prospective EU members closer to the West and NATO and pulled them away from Russia’s orbit. It also encroached on Russian economic and financial interests, and sometimes preliminary agreements between the EU and prospective members have included a military component.

    Zbigniew Brzezinski set out the geopolitical, civilizational, and ultimately American power-maximizing nature of Washington’s and Brussels’s thinking with regard to the goal and purportedly symbiotic nature of enlarging both NATO and the EU:

    The essential point regarding NATO expansion is that it is a process integrally connected with Europe’s own expansion. …

    … Ultimately at stake in this effort is America’s long-range role in Europe. A new Europe is still taking shape, and if that new Europe is to remain geopolitically a part of the “Euro-Atlantic” space, the expansion of NATO is essential. Indeed, a comprehensive U.S. policy for Eurasia as a whole will not be possible if the effort to widen NATO, having been launched by the United States, stalls and falters. That failure would discredit American leadership; it would shatter the concept of an expanding Europe; it would demoralize the Central Europeans; and it could reignite currently dormant or dying Russian geopolitical aspirations in Central Europe. For the West, it would be a self-inflicted wound that would morally damage the prospects for a truly European pillar in any eventual Eurasian security architecture; and for America, it would thus be not only a regional defeat but a global defeat as well.

    The bottom line guiding the progressive expansion of Europe has to be the proposition that no power outside of the existing transatlantic system has the right to veto the participation of any qualified European state in the European system—and hence also its transatlantic security system—and that no qualified European state should be excluded a priori from eventual membership in either the EU or NATO.[24]

    Other proponents of NATO expansion influential in policymaking also state openly that EU expansion is crucial for the former.[25] Consistent with such analyses, which has been the policy in Washington and Brussels, EU and NATO enlargement have gone hand-in-hand. As of writing, both the EU and NATO each had 28 member-states; their memberships are almost identical. The United States, Canada, and Albania are the only NATO member-states that are not EU members, but Albania will soon be an EU member. Cyprus, Malta, and Sweden are the only EU members that are not NATO member-states.[26]

    When it comes to the post-Soviet and post-communist states of East and Central Europe, the EU has been NATO’s Trojan horse. Once any of these states has started on the EU accession process by signing an EU association agreement, it has taken on average 8 and a half years before it accedes to NATO (see Table 1). These states have taken five years and eight months on average to

    ___________________________________________________________

    Table 1. Key Dates in Post-Communist Statess Accession Processes to EU and NATO.

    ————————————————————————————————————————–

    EU AA Signed           EU AA in Force          EU Member                NATO

    ———————————————————————————————————————————-

    Albania            12 June 2006            1 April 2009                        –                   1 April 2009

    Bulgaria           8 March 1993           1 February 1995      1 January 2007    29 March 2004

    Croatia            29 October 2001       1 February 2005       1 July 2013          1 April 2009

    Czech Rep.     4 October 1993          1 February 1995        1 May 2004        12 March 1999

    Estonia            12 June 1995              1 February 1998       1 May 2004        29 March 2004

    Hungary          16 December 1991    1 February 1994        1 May 2004        12 March 1999

    Latvia              12 June 1995              1 February 1998        1 May 2004        29 March 2004

    Lithuania        12 June 1995              1 February 1998        1 May 2004        29 March 2004

    Poland             16 December 1991     1 February 1994        1 May 2004        12 March 1999

    Romania          1 February 1993        1 February 1995       1 January 2007   29 March 2004

    Slovakia          4 October 1993           1 February 1995        1 May 2004        29 March 2004

    Slovenia          10 June 1996               1 February 1999        1 May 2004        29 March 2004

    ———————————————————————————————————————————-

    *Countries in italics are not post-communist or post-Soviet states.

    ___________________________________________________________

    accede officially to NATO membership after EU association agreements have come into force usually a few years after signing. In each post-Soviet/post-communist case, accession to NATO preceded EU accession. As noted above, these organizations made no great secret of the interrelationship between EU and NATO accession processes. For example, the ‘Charter on a Distinctive Partnership between the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and Ukraine’ stipulated the parties were “looking forward to” Ukraine’s “integration with the full range of European and Euro-Atlantic structures.”[27] This phrasing was a not-so-veiled reference to Ukraine’s eventual membership accession processes to both the EU and NATO.

    In addition to the Trojan horse element of EU expansion, the inclusion of post-communist and especially post-Soviet states in the EU would inevitably have a deleterious effect on Russia’s trade and economy. The accession of the small Baltic states’ economies to the EU would have “profound consequences” for Moscow by accelerating the reorientation of these economies away from Russia and erecting new trade and other economic barriers between Russia and the Baltic states, damaging the Russian economy. EU rules, policies and standards would complicate Russian access to the Baltic states, and EU goods would flood the Russian market unless Moscow erected barriers against them, limiting Russia’s integration into the European economy.

    Indeed, another EU policy, the Eastern Partnership Program, specifically set about isolating Russia’s economy from those of prospective EU members. Launched in 2008, the EPP was established to strengthen EU relationships with Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia—that is, all the former Soviet republics still outside the EU and NATO, except Russia and the Central Asian states. A former European Parliament and Council of Europe advisor and well-connected activist proponent of NATO and EU expansion noted publicly in 2015: “Let’s not pretend: the European Union’s Eastern Partnership clearly excludes Russia.” According to this operative, the EPP was designed to “push back” against “those who favor a ‘Russia first’ policy” when it comes to the EU’s integration of Eastern Europe, and the program had “become the de facto dividing line between Russia and ‘not Russia’.” He did caution that “the EU should think less about winning the EPP countries away from Russia, and more about instituting lasting economic and political reforms,” “not punish countries that choose closer association with the Eurasian Union,” and “continue to prioritize Ukraine and help Georgia and Moldova” for reform assistance but postpone their membership accession.”[28] Not surprisingly, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov agreed with this assessment as war in Ukraine began to rage: “The EU’s Eastern Partnership programme is designed to bind the so-called focus states tightly to itself, shutting down the possibility of co-operation with Russia.”[29] That the EPP was in fact a mechanism helping to isolate Russia and expand the EU (and thus NATO as well) was underscored by the fact that it would be a EEP summit in Vilnius on 28 November 2013 that would provide the spark that would set off the Ukrainian crisis, as discussed in the next chapter.

    It is important not to overstate the impact of EU enlargement relative to that of NATO expansion proper on the alienation from democracy, capitalism, and the West. If there were no NATO expansion, Moscow would have easily tolerated EU expansion despite the damage it would cause to its economic interests. Thus, in February 1997 then Russian Foreign Minister Primakov expressed Moscow’s “positive” attitude towards the Baltic states’ possible entry into the EU.[30] The reverse is not true. Primakov and few others among the Russian elite or public have viewed NATO expansion as benign in terms of Russian national security.

    More important is that NATO expansion in effect ‘militarized’ or ‘securitized’—that is, added a vital national security component to—EU expansion, not just in perceptions but in reality. Thus, in 1998 Garnett admitted, vaguely albeit, that there are “security implications” from EU accession of the Balts—and by implication, other post-Soviet and post-communist states—“both within the terms of the European Union itself” and by way of “direct links between the core members of the Union and NATO.”[31]

    The EU-Ukraine Association Agreement

    The draft EU-Ukraine Association Agreement that now deposed Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovich reneged on signing in November 2013 which then set off the initial demonstrations in Kiev that would evolve into a violent revolution led by a small group of neo-fascists in February 2014 was not a purely economic or financial document. It included military and security clauses that would help Ukraine prepare for NATO membership. These clauses included the agreement’s Articles 5 and 10, which read:

    Article 5 

    Fora for the conduct of political dialogue:

    (1) The Parties shall hold regular political dialogue meetings at Summit level. 

    (2)At ministerial level, political dialogue shall take place within the Association Council referred to in [Article 460] [of this Agreement] and within the framework of regular meetings between representatives of the Parties at Foreign Minister level by mutual agreement. 

    (3) Political dialogue shall also take place in the following formats:

          (a) regular meetings at Political Directors, Political and Security Committee and expert level, including on specific regions and issues, between representatives of the European Union on the one hand, and representatives of Ukraine on the other; 

          (b) taking full and timely advantage of all diplomatic and military channels between the Parties, including appropriate contacts in third countries and within the United Nations, the OSCE and other international fora; 

          (c) regular meetings both at the level of high officials and of experts of the military institutions of the Parties; 

    Article 10 

    Conflict prevention, crisis management and military-technological cooperation 

    (1) The Parties shall enhance practical cooperation in conflict prevention and crisis management, in particular with a view to an increased participation of Ukraine in EU-led civilian and military crisis management operations as well as relevant exercises and training including those in the framework of the Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP).

    The Parties shall explore the potential of military and technological cooperation. Ukraine and the European Defence Agency (EDA) will establish close contacts to discuss military capability improvement, including technological issues.[32]

    Conclusion

    To sum up, Moscow had good reason to believe that the Maidan revolution would in fact lead to Ukraine’s membership in NATO. The Obama administration endorsed the violent and illegal seizure of power in a country where the democracy deficit is not nearly as great as it is in perhaps more than one hundred other countries, including NATO member Turkey.

    Earlier this year the Maidan regime signed the EU association agreement. Subsequently, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko stated that Kiev would fulfill all criteria for NATO membership in 6-8 years. A U.S. official, apparently in greater hurry, said this is expected by the year 2020.[33] Although Russia has been allowed to negotiate with the parties on measures to protect Russia’s market from effects on the Russian market that will follow its implementation, the real issue is international security not trade. The agreement’s signing means the clock is ticking on Ukraine’s entry into NATO. This is well-known in Washington, Brussels and Moscow.

    Appendix: Former U.S. Defense Secretary William Perry’s Recent Press Comments:

    The United States is as much to blame for the state of U.S.-Russia relations as the Kremlin, a former Defense secretary under former President Bill Clinton said Thursday.

    “It’s as much our fault as it is the fault of the Russians, at least originally,” said William Perry, who served as Defense secretary from 1994 to 1997. “And it began when I was secretary.” …

    “But if you look over a 20-year period and put the scoreboard together, there are at least as many American mistakes as there were Russian.”

    Specifically, Perry cited the expansion of NATO and the decision to send U.S.-led NATO forces to Bosnia in 1996 as the start of the downfall of U.S.-Russia relations.

    Prior to that, he said, relations were going well, including four joint military exercises between Russia and NATO.

    “We were on the way to forging a really positive and solid relationship between the U.S. troops, and then in 1996 we announced we were going to expand NATO, which, as I said, I’m not opposed to in general, but it was premature,” he said. “That was the first move down the slippery slope.”

    Still, in Bosnia, the United States and Russia came to an agreement to operate under the same command, thereby avoiding any potential disastrous accidents between the two nations, Perry said.

    He doubts that could happen in Syria today.

    “You cannot imagine getting that decision today that we got back in 1997, ’96,” he said.[34]

    ________________

    FOOTNOTES

    [1] Kathryn Stoner and Michael McFaul, “Who Lost Russia (This Time)? Vladimir Putin,”The Washington Quarterly, Summer 2015, http://twq.elliott.gwu.edu/who-lost-russia-time-vladimir-putin.

    [2] “NATO’s Relations with Georgia,” NATO, 7 September 2015,http://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/topics_38988.htm?selectedLocale=en.

    [3] “Declaration to Complement the Charter on a Distinctive Partnership between the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and Ukraine, as signed on 9 July 1997,” NATO, 21 August 2009, http://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/official_texts_57045.htm?selectedLocale=en.

    [4] “Yanukovych: Ukraine will be a non-aligned state,” Kyiv Post, 23 October 2009,http://www.kyivpost.com/content/ukraine/yanukovych-ukraine-will-be-non-aligned-state-51207.html.

    [5] “Yanukovych describes current level of Ukraine’s cooperation with NATO as sufficient,” Inerfax-Ukraine, 12 January 2010,http://en.interfax.com.ua/news/general/29568.html.

    [6] “Yanukovych opens door to Russian navy keeping base in Ukraine,” Global Security, 13 February 2010, www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/library/news/ukraine/2010/ukraine-100213-rianovosti02.htm citing RIA Novosti.

    [7] “Tanukovysh Says Ukraine Seeks ‘Non-Aliged’ UE ties (Update 2),” Bloomberg, 25 February 2010, http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=a89SZz9MfVt0.

    [8] “Ukraine’s Yanukovych: EU ties a ‘key priority’,” Kyiv Post, 1 March 2010,http://www.kyivpost.com/content/ukraine/ukraines-yanukovych-eu-ties-a-key-priority-60720.html.

    [9] “Cabinet approces action plan for annual national program of cooperation with NATO in 2012,” Kyiv Post, 24 June 2010,http://www.kyivpost.com/content/politics/cabinet-approves-action-plan-for-annual-national-p-70823.html.

    [10] “Military Manoeuvers in Ukraine,” Euronews, 4 August 2011,http://www.euronews.com/nocomment/2011/08/04/military-manoeuvres-in-ukraine/.

    [11] “Ukraine, NATO to hold security exercises during Euro 2012,” Kyiv Post, 26 March 2012, http://www.kyivpost.com/content/ukraine/ukraine-nato-to-hold-security-exercises-during-eur-124954.html?flavour=ful.

    [12] John Thys, “Ukraine Joins NATO’s Counter-Piracy Operation,” RIA Novosti(Sputnik), 22 February 2013,http://sputniknews.com/military/20130222/179631923/Ukraine-Joins-NATOs-Counter-Piracy-Operation.html.

    [13] “Yanukovych signs decree on Ukraine-NATO annual cooperation programs,”Interfax-Ukraine, 12 June 2013,http://www.kyivpost.com/content/politics/yanukovych-signs-decree-on-ukraine-nato-annual-cooperation-programs-325558.html.

    [14] “Ukraine’s parliament votes to abandon Nato ambitions,” BBC News, 3 June 2010,http://www.bbc.com/news/10229626.

    [15] NATO considers Ukraine’s behavior ‘unprecedented’,” Kyiv Post, 25 May 2010,http://www.kyivpost.com/content/ukraine/nato-considers-ukraines-behavior-unprecedented-67634.html.

    [16] Thys, “Ukraine Joins NATO’s Counter-Piracy Operation”.

    [17] Ivan Katchanovski, “Political Regionalism in ‘Orange’ Ukraine,” Working paper,http://www.academia.edu/454776/Political_Regionalism_in_Orange_Ukraine, at p. 38 (last accessed on 19 December 2015) as calculated from “Informatsiina skladova evropeiskoi ta evroatlantychnoi integratsii: gromadska dumka,” Natzionalna bezpeka i oborona, Volume 1, 2008, pp. 42-60 and “Sotsiologichne opituvannya: Yakbi nastupnoi nedili vidbuvavsya referendum shchodo vstupu Ukrayni do NATO, yak bi Vi progolosovali? (dinamika, regional’nii rozpodil, 2002-2008),” Razumkov Center, 2009,http://www.uceps.org/ukr/poll.php?poll_id=116, last accessed on 19 December 2015.

    [18] Ye. V. Knyazeva, “20 let nezavisimosti: mneneie ekspertov i naseleniya yuga Ukrainy,” in Yezhegodnaya nauchno-prakticheskaya sotsiologicheskaya konferentsiya ‘Prodolzhaya Grushina’, p. 156,http://wciom.ru/fileadmin/file/nauka/grusha_2012/tezisy/soc/knjazeva.pdf.

    [19] See, for example, Lowell Barrington, “The Geographic Component of Mass Attitudes in Ukraine,” Post-SovietGeography, Volume 38, 1997, pp. 601-614; Vicki Hesli, William Reisinger, and Arthur Miller, “Political Party Development in Divided Societies: The Case of Ukraine,” Electoral Studies, Volume 17, 1998, pp. 235-256; Stephen Shulman, “Asymmetrical International Integration and Ukrainian National Disunity,” Political Geography, Volume 18, 1999, pp. 913-939; Sarah Birch, “Interpreting the Regional Effect in Ukrainian Politics,” Europe-Asia Studies, Volume 52, 2000, pp. 1017-1042; Paul Kubicek, “Regional Polarisation in Ukraine: Public Opinion,Voting and Legislative Behaviour,” Europe-Asia Studies, Volume 52, 2000, pp. 272-293; Lowell Barrington and Erick Herron, “One Ukraine or Many?: Regionalism in Ukraine and its political consequences,” Nationalities Papers, Volume 32, 2004, pp. 53-86; Dominique Arel, “The Orange Revolution’s hidden face: Ukraine and the denial of its regional problem,”Revue Detudes Comparatives Est-Ouest, Volume 37, 2006, pp. 11-48.

    [20] For the results of 12 opinion surveys conducted between 2002 and 2013, see “Ukrainian-NATO Relations,” Wikipedia.org,http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukraine%E2%80%93NATO_relations, last accessed 19 December 2015.

    [21] “End of Communism Cheered But Now With More Reservations – Chapter 9. Rating the EU and NATO,” Pew Global Research, 2 November 2009,http://www.pewglobal.org/2009/11/02/chapter-9-rating-the-eu-and-nato/ and Simon Shuster, “NATO Too Wary of Russian Threats to Let Ukraine Join,” Time, 4 September 2014, http://time.com/3271057/nato-ukraine-membership/.

    [22] Motyl admitted in a November 2014 discussion that in the past opinion polls showed 15-20 percent of Ukrainians maximum supported NATO membership. Just before 2012 support hovered around 25-35 percent. It fell to approximately 15-20 percent in favor of NATO membership in 2013, he noted. “Podcast: A Year of Living Dangerously,” RFERL, 21 November 2014, http://www.rferl.org/content/podcast-a-year-of-living-dangerously/26703995.html, last accessed on 19 December 2015.

    [23] “’Post-Orange’ Ukraine: Internal Dynamics and Foreign Policy Priorities,” NATO Parliamentary Assembly, 2011, http://www.nato-pa.int/default.Asp?SHORTCUT=2439, last accessed 19 December 2015.

    [24] Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard, pp. 79-80.

    [25] Ronald D. Asmus and Robert C. Nurick, “NATO Enlargement and the Baltic States,”Survival, Vol. 38, No. 2, Summer 1996, pp. 121-42.

    [26] The list of NATO and EU member-states are as follows (those countries in bold-face type in each list are not member-sates of the other organization). The 28 NATO member countries are: Albania, Belgium, Bulgaria, Canada, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Turkey, United Kingdom, United States. The 28 EU member countries are: Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland (UK), Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, the United Kingdom.

    [27] Charter on a Distinctive Partnership between the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and Ukraine, NATO, 9 July 1997,http://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/official_texts_25457.htm.

    [28] Balázs Jarábik, “A Policy of Pretending,” Carnegie Moscow Center, 25 May 2015,http://carnegie.ru/commentary/?fa=60187.

    [29] Sergei Lavrov, “It’s not Russia that is destabilising Ukraine,” The Guardian (UK), 8 April 2014, http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/apr/07/sergei-lavrov-russia-stabilise-ukraine-west.

    [30] Garnett, “Russia and the West in the New Borderlands,” p. 98, footnote 42.

    [31] Garnett, “Russia and the West in the New Borderlands,” pp. 98-99, footnote 42.

    [32] www.bilaterals.org/IMG/pdf/eu-ukraine-association-agreement-english.pdf.

    [33]  “Poroshenko posevetoval ne zhdat’ Ukrainiu v NATO esho 8 let,” Vesti Ukraina, 7 November 2015, http://vesti-ukr.com/strana/122612-poroshenko-posovetoval-ne-zhdat-ukrainu-v-nato-ewe-8-let and “V SShA zayavili o perekhode Ukrainy na standarty NATO do 2020 goda,” Vesti Ukraina, 6 November 2015, http://vesti-ukr.com/strana/122485-v-ssha-zajavili-o-perehode-ukrainy-na-standarty-nato-do-2020-goda.

    [34] Rebecca Khell, “Former Pentagon chief: US shares blame for poor relations with Russia,” The Hill, 3 December 2015, www.thehill.com/policy/defense/261940-former-defense-secretary-us-shares-blame-for-poor-relations-with-russia.

    Comments Off on The Russian-American ‘Reset’, NATO Expansion, and the Making of the Ukrainian Crisis

    Georgia’s Propaganda War

    April 15th, 2015

     

     

    By Gordon M. Hahn.

     

     

    The five-day Georgian-Russian saw Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili and other Georgian officials waging an aggressive propaganda campaign and, in many ways, a disinformation war in the Western mass media. This media offensive was the result either of a carefully planned disinformation war or a rush by Western governments, mainstream media, and think tanks to get the Georgians’ side of the story and their side only. Either way, the Georgians were able to wage an effective and constant barrage of propaganda and disinformation against the Russians.

    In some 40 appearances in the Western media and at Western think tanks, President Saakasahvili and his ministers made numerous false statements in their effort to convince the West that it was obliged to defend Tbilisi from Russia’s incursion. The following is a review of Georgia’s official version of events and a comparison of their claims with the facts as we know them as of late August and early September 2008.

    THE RUSSIAN PLANNED FOR WAR AND WHO ATTACKED FIRST

    Georgian officials were careful in all cases to avoid mention of the fact that it began escalated tit-for-tat sniper and artillery exchanges to the level of all-out war by undertaking an offensive to seize South Ossetia’s capitol of Tskhinval. After seizing South Ossetia the Georgian army’s blitzkrieg likely would have moved on to Abkhazia. President Saakashvili and other Georgian officials repeatedly accused Russia of undertaking a “well-planned invasion” of Georgia designed to size the country and remove him from power. Saakashvili told CNN on 8 August: “Russian troops have been stationed near the border for a few, three or four months. They were claiming that they were staging exercises there, and as soon as a suitable pretext was found yesterday they moved in.”

    [CNN interview with Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, CNN News, 8 Aug, 2008,http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/world/2008/08/08/intv.saakashvili.cnn?iref=videosearch.

    In other words, Russian forces were ready to pounce once Ossetian forces prompted by Moscow began firing on Georgian villages.

    Saakashvili further claims that on August 7 Georgian settlements were fired upon by Russian-backed Ossetian forces first after he declared a ceasefire and that as Georgian forces moved in to move on Tskhinvali in response to Ossetian attacks, Russian forces were already entering Georgia through the Roki tunnel. Saakashvili laid out this argument in his August 14 Washington Post article “Russia’s War Is the West’s Challenge” in these words:

    Russia, using its separatist proxies, attacked several peaceful, Georgian-controlled villages in South Ossetia, killing innocent civilians and damaging infrastructure.

    On Aug. 6, just hours after a senior Georgian official traveled to South Ossetia to attempt negotiations, a massive assault was launched on Georgian settlements. Even as we came under attack, I declared a unilateral cease-fire in hopes of avoiding escalation and announced our willingness to talk to the separatists in any format.

    But the separatists and their Russian masters were deaf to our calls for peace. Our government then learned that columns of Russian tanks and troops had crossed Georgia’s sovereign borders. The thousands of troops, tanks and artillery amassed on our border are evidence of how long Russia had been planning this aggression.

    [Mikheil Saakashvili, “Russia’s War Is The West’s Challenge,” Washington Post, August 14, 2008.]

    What is perhaps most striking about this article is that the Georgian president has the very date for these events wrong – they occurred on August 7, not August 6. Indeed, Saakashvili himself (like all other reports) indicated this in his August 7 televised address on the crisis. [See “Sakashvili’s Televised Address on S. Ossetia,” Civil Georgia, 7 August 2008, 21:45, www.civil.ge.] Saakashvili’s article has the earmarks of one written in haste by someone with a loose attitude toward the facts. Aside from this, Saakashvili’s version of events is at odds with every account of the events leading up to the war.

    First, Saakashvili omits from his account that Georgian forces began to occupy the hills surrounding Tskhainvali days earlier and were trying to do so for weeks since June. [SeeKavkaz-uzel.ru, for example, http://www.kavkaz-uzel.ru/newstext/news/id/1223412.htmlhttp://www.kavkaz-uzel.ru/newstext/news/id/1223638.html. Saakashvili was moving his troops and artillery into position to invade Tskhinvali throughout the first week of August. Georgian forces renewed lower-intensity military operations around Tskhinvali on August 1, including moving into position for the offensive. Georgian snipers were firing at Ossetian villages. [See the report on the liberal-oriented Russian human rights website Kavak uzel “V Yuzhnoi Osetii zayavlyayut, chto Gruzia pazmestila artilleriyu bliz zony konflikta,” Kavkaz uzel, 4 August 2008, www.kavkaz-uzel.ru/newstext.newsid/1226489.html.] This was one of the main reasons for the escalating in tit-for-tat machine-gun, sniper, and mortar fire that preceeded the outbreak of general hostilities in the weeks prior to August 7.

    Second, the location of Russia’s 58th Army on the eve of the war could have represented contingency planning based on good intelligence rather than on intent to invade. The fact is that Russia’s 58th army, from which the troops and equipment for the incursion came, is based in Vladikavkaz, North Ossetia, just across the border from South Ossetia. It is the nucleus of Russia’s military presence in its jhadi-plagued North Caucasus. In late July Russia’s North Caucasus Military District carried out military exercises involving the core of Russia’s military presence in the North Caucasus, the noted 58thArmy. Some units could easily have been put on alert and moved near the border as the tit-for-tat fighting escalated between Georgians and Ossetians. Surely any competent military would have had contingency plans in the event that Saakashvili invaded one or both of the breakaway republics; a danger which remained real as long as he refused to sign an agreement rejecting to solve the frozen conflict by force of arms as proposed by Russia, South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

    Third, Georgia’s official version of the events, as stated in his Washington Post article and elsewhere, is gravely at odds with what has been reported in virtually every non-Georgian source on the war as well as with Georgian officials’ statements on specifics regarding mobilization of reinforcemnts. In an August 8 CNN interview Saakashvili specified the time of the Russian invasion: “At 24am last night Russian APCs started to cross into Georgian territory, and there we had to act.”  CNN interview with Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, CNN News, 8 August 2008,http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/world/2008/08/08/intv.saakashvili.cnn?iref=videosearch.

    However, five days later in a conference call with journalists he moved the time of the Russian invasion up in another attempt to claim the Russians moved first: “We clerarly responded to the Russians…The point here is that around 11 o’clock Russian tanks started to move into Georgian territory, 150 at first. And that was a clear-cut invasion.” [“Countdown in the Caucasus: Seven days that brought Russia and Georgia to war,”Financial Times, August 27m 2008.] Georgia’s deputy defense minister Batu Kutelia also said Russia began to move heavy armour through the Roki tunnel from North Ossetia before Georgian forces opened up its artillery barrage and attacked South Ossetia around midnight August 7-8, but gave no evidence to back this up. In fact, he also said that Georgian war planners did not believe Russia would respond to Tbilisi’s offensive in South Ossetia, leaving readers to wonder how he could claim both that Russians had responded to Georgian operations and that they intiated the war by crossing Roki first. [Jan Cienski, “Tbilisi admits it miscalculated Russian reaction,”Financial Times, August 22, 2008.]

    There is no mention of Georgia’s mobilization for war – a mobilization that began hours and even days before Saakashvili’s declaration of a unilateral ceasefire at 7:10pm local time on August 7 – either in Saakashvili’s or most other Georgian officials’ version of events. The OSCE monitoring mission reported that Georgia moved 3,000 special forces into the hills and villages surrounding Tskhinvali on August 6 in complete violation of the ceasefire agreement before flagrantly violating it by unleashing GRAD missiles on August 7. Georgian Defense Minister Davit Kezerashvili has revealed that already hours before the August 7 ceasefire announcement an additional 800 Georgian forces of Georgia’s 4th Battalion began to move out from their base in Tbilisi. Other units equipped with Grad rocket launchers moved out from the base near Gori towards the conflict zone. Russia forces massed on the Russian side of the North Ossetian-South Ossetian border, tipped off about the Georgians’ preparations by intelligence surveillance. [Peter Finn “A Two-Sided Descent into Full-Scale War,” The Washington Post, August 17, 2008, p. A1.]

    Moreover, once these reinforcements arrived, Tbilisi informed commander of the Russian peacekeepers, General Marat Kulakhmetova, that the ceasefire has been cancelled. At 11:05pm, about the time Saakashvili claims Russian tanks were moving into Georgia, Mamuka Kurashvili, chief of peacekeeping operations at the Georgian defence ministry, announced in a nationwide television broadcast an end to the ceasefire and the beginning of a Georgian military operation. He did not mention any Russian invasion in his speech. Rather, he claimed the offensive was targeting the South Ossetian separatists who “continued the shelling of Georgian villages.” In an indication that Saakashvili may not have had complete control over Georgia’s armed forces, Kurashvili asserted that “Georgian power-wielding bodies decided to restore constitutional order throughout the whole region.” [“Countdown in the Caucasus,”Financial Times, August 27, 2008 citing BBC Monitoring.] At 11:30pm, Russian peacekeeping forces and all other sources corroborate that Georgian forces initiated a massive artillery barrage on a sleepy residential Tskhinval. [“Countdown in the Caucasus,” Financial Times, August 27, 2008.]

    In the weeks before the war, Saakashvili increased the contingent of Georgian forces near Georgia’s other breakaway republic, Abkhazia in violation of the ceasefire agreementsForeign Minister Abkhazia Sergei Shamba states that on eve of conflict Georgia had 3,000 troops in Abkhazia’s Kodori Gorge. [Sergei Markedonov, “Abkhazia 16 let spustya,” Politcom.ru, 14 August 2008, http://www.politcom.ru/print.php?id=6690. This explains the Russian force that entered Abkhazia on August 8 and suggests that Saakashvili was not simply the victim of Ossetian-Russian provocations but appears to have been gearing up for a gambit to seize back both breakaway republics, hoping U.S. support would cover him.

    Thus, as Saakashvili’s troops around Tskhinvali were loading ammunition into their guns, mortars and cannons in early evening of August 7, Saakashvili told the world he was implementing a unilateral ceasefire. [See “Sakashvili’s Televised Address on S. Ossetia,” Civil Georgia, 7 August 2008, 21:45, http://www.civil.ge. Hours later, the Georgian artillery began to pound Tskhinvali. The Georgian side had significantly escalated the tit-for-tat attacks by initiating a major military offensive against South Ossetia, prompting the Russians’ readied response. Remember that an attack on Ossetians in South Ossetia would inevitably have provoked a mass mobilization of volunteers among Ossetians in Russia’s republic of North Ossetia without Moscow’s intervention.

    Georgia’s fourteen-hour barrage destroyed large parts of the city and included attacks on the hospital and ambulances. [See Larisa Sotieva, “Eyewitnesses: Carnage in Tskhinvali,” Caucasus Reporting Service, Institute of War and Peace Reporting, 12 August 2008, http://www.iwpr.net and Sara Rainsford, “S. Ossetia’s Ruins Seethe with Anger,” BBC News, 13 August 2008.] Human Rights Watch concluded after a visit to Tskhinvali that the evidence suggested that the bulk of the damage to the city was caused by Georgian forces. [SOURCES] Thus, Saakashvili inflicted many, perhaps hundreds of casualties, including killing 15 and wounding tens of Russian peacekeepers, even before Russian crossed the Roki Tunnel.

    Perhaps more importantly, Georgian military officials have in advertently revealed that Tbilisi had brought heavy artillery into the conflict zone very early on. If civilian and Russian peacekeeping force reports that heavy artillery was bombing Tskhinvali from approximately midnight on August 7-8, then perhaps the comments of Georgian Artillery Brigade Commander Maj-Gen Devi Chankotadze will impress. He told a Georgian newspaper: “Georgian artillery made an impact during the August 2008 conflict in Tskhinvali and delivered a heavy blow on the enemy. We destroyed several Russian columns on their way to Tskhinvali. The Russians are concealing the fact that they suffered heavy losses.” Col Arsen Tsukhishvili, chief of staff of the Artillery Brigade, added. “We had four observation points in strategically important areas near Tskhinvali and Java districts.” The Georgian reporter added: “At least 300 gun barrels of Georgian artillery were firing at the enemy simultaneously! These included the 203-mm Pion systems, the 160-mm Israeli-made GRADLAR multiple rocket launchers, the 152-mm Akatsiya, Giatsint and Dana self-propelled guns, the 122-mm Grad and RM-70 multiple rocket launchers, as well as the D-30 and Msta howitzers of the infantry brigades.” [“Georgian artillery inflicted ‘heavy losses’ on Russians,” BBC Monitoring, August 25, 2008 translating Georgian weekly Kviris Palitra, August 25, 2008.]

    It takes many days if not weeks to bring in the kind of heavy artillery the commander is talking about through the mountainous terrain around South Ossetia from Georgian army bases in Tbilisi, Senaki or Gori. If they were not on their bases, then they were located just outside the conflict zone ready to be brought in as hostilities became imminent. In that case, the Georgians were doing no less than what the Russians are being accused of doing in North Ossetia. If the artillery was already in the zone, they Georgian forces were in violation of the previous ceasefire agreement and were exceeding Russian efforts on South ossetian territory to ‘provoke war.’

    As Russian and Ossetian forces engaged the Georgian army on August 8, Saakashvili claimed: “The Georgian government’s forces, according to information as of 21:00, completely control the entire territory of South Ossetia except the highland settlements of Dzhava.” [“Saakashvili: voiska Gruzii kontroliruet vsyu territoriyu Yuzhnoi Ossetii,”KavkazMemo.ru, 8 August 2008, www.kavkaz-uzel.ru/printnews/news/id/1226844.html.] In fact, Georgian troops never even controlled all of Tskhinvali and began withdrawing from there at 8:30pm and held a small slice of the city in the south as Russian troops began to enter it. [Timeline for the Georgian Foreign Ministry, accessed August 28, 2008, www.mfa.gov.ge/index.php?lang_id=ENG&sec_id=461&info_id=7484p.] The Russian entry into Tskhinvali came over 20 hours after the beginning of ‘pre-planned invasion’ during the initial stages of which Russian president was in Samara, not Moscow, premier Putin was in China, and the head of the Russian Security Council and the commander of the 58th army were on vacation.

    CONTACTS WITH RUSSIAN AUTHORITIES

    In his August 14 Washington Post article, Saakashvilit stated: “Our repeated attempts to contact senior Russian leaders were rebuffed. Russia’s foreign ministry even denied receiving our notice of cease-fire hours after it was officially — and very publicly — delivered. This was just one of many cynical ploys to deceive the world and justify further attacks.” [Saakashvili, “Russia’s War Is The West’s Challenge”] The Georgian president was reiterating a claim he made in his televised address to the Georgian people on August 7, when he Saakashvili stated that the Georgian authorities had not been in touch with Vladimir Putin or other Russian authorities “for days.” [CNN interview with Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, CNN News, 8 August 2008,www.cnn.com/video/#/video/world/2008/08/08/intv.saakashvili.cnn?iref=videosearch.]

    However, on the next day in his television address to the Georgian people Saakashvili said: “We have been in constant contact with the leadership of the local Russian peacekeeping forces. Several hours ago, they told us that they have completely lost control over the actions of the separatists.… We are in constant contact with the leadership of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the ministry tells us Russia is trying to stop the separatists from engaging in armed action, but without any success.” [“Sakashvili’s Televised Address on S. Ossetia,” Civil Georgia, 7 August 2008, 21:45,www.civil.ge.]

    HOW MANY RUSSIAN TANKS AND ARMORED VEHICLES?

    Concomitant to the Georgian claim that Russia planned an invasion and then provoked Georgia into attacking so it could ‘respond’ was the claim that the initial Russian invasion involved 1,200 tanks or 1,200 tanks and armored personnel carriers combined. Saakashvili and other Georgian officials made this claims, respectively. However, during a conference call with journalists on August 11, Saakashvili said that Georgian towns were “extensively being bombed” but that only 500 Russian tanks were on Georgian territory. [Henry Meyer and Lucian Kim, “Russia Bombs Georgia as EU Mounts Peace Mission to Moscow,” Bloomberg, August 11, 2008.] Saakashvili again revised his figures upwards, this time radically so, in a speech at a August 24 meeting with some Georgian parliamentarians at the State Chancellery broadcast live on Georgian television. He claimed that the Russian military operation “planned for many months” brought “80,000 servicemen and mercenaries” and “about 3,000 armored vehicles” into Georgia. [“President says 80,000 Russian soldiers, 3,000 armored vehicles invaded Georgia,” BBC Monitoring, August 24, 2008 citing Channel 1, Tbilisi, August 24, 2008, 1600 GMT.] Such a deployment of equipment would mean that Russia’s entire 58th Army was deployed from its jihad-plagued North Caucasus to South Ossetia.

    On August 18, 2008 the Heritage Foundation convened a conference ‘The Russia-Georgian War: A Challenge to the U.S. and the World’ chaired by the foundation’s Eurasia specialist Ariel Cohen, which served as another forum for the Georgians to spin their web of disinformation. The conference speakers included the Georgian Ambassador to the US Vasil Sikharulidze and, by video phone, the Georgian Minister for Reintegration of Abkhazia and South Ossetia Temuri Yakobashvili but no one from the Russian government or the embassy down the street. All of the conference speakers, with the exception of Johns Hopkins University Professor Frederick Starr, focused exclusively on presenting or supporting the Georgian side of the story ((See the transcript of a Heritage Foundation Forum on the Russian-Georgian War “A Challenge for the U.S. and the World,” Heritage Foundation, Washington DC, August 18, 2008, Federal News Service, August 18, 2008). Ambassador Sikhuralidze told the conference that “1,200 tanks and 15,000 soldiers” entered Georgia “within 12 hours” bringing the number of Russian troops in all of Georgia to 25,000 as of August 18. His colleague Minister for Reintegration Yakobashvili stated there were 1,200 tanks and armored personnel carriers when asked how many troops and how much equipment entered Georgia in the first 48 hours of the Russian incursion. [Transcript of a Heritage Foundation Forum on the Russian-Georgian War “A Challenge for the U.S. and the World,” Heritage Foundation, Washington DC, August 18, 2008, Federal News Service, August 18, 2008.] Three weeks after the war Yakobashvili also escalated his figures to “2,000 tanks.” [Nikolaus von Twickel, “Theories Swirl About War’s Beginning,” The Moscow Times, August 28, 2008.]

    In fact, the Russian force appears to have been much smaller. The respected Janes’ Defence Weekly reported that in fact the “invasion force consisted of 15,000 and 150 tanks and heavy self-propelled artillery pieces.” [Giragosian, “Georgian planning flaws led to campaign failure.”] No independent source has confirmed the figures for the number of Russian forces on Georgian territory claimed by Georgian officials.

    RUSSIAN ATROCITIES

    Georgian pronouncements on the conduct of Russian forces in Georgia grossly exaggerated and appeared to conjure fabricated lies about their conduct on Georgian territory in an attempt to tag them with war crimes and gain the world’s sympathy. In his August 18 Washington Post article, Saakashvili characterized Russian forces as a “brutal invading army, whose violence was ripping Georgia apart.” Specifically, he charged them with committing wanton destruction and war atrocities against the civilian population: Oddly, he adds: “(I)n response to which his government “decided to withdraw from South Ossetia, declare a cease-fire and seek negotiations. Yet Moscow ignored our appeal for peace.” He also wrote in the same article: “Within 24 hours of Russia agreeing to a cease-fire, its forces were rampaging through Gori; blocking the port of Poti; sinking Georgian vessels; and — worst of all — brutally purging Georgian villages in South Ossetia, raping women and executing men.” [Saakashvili, “Russia’s War Is The West’s Challenge”] On the same day as well, Saakashvili stated in a CNN interview that Russian planes were “specifically targeting the civilian population, and we have scores of wounded and dead among the civilian population all around the country, not so much in the conflict area.” [CNN interview with Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, CNN News, 8 August 2008,www.cnn.com/video/#/video/world/2008/08/08/intv.saakashvili.cnn?iref=videosearch.] Four days later, at an August 12 press conference, Saakashvili asserted that despite a ceasefire, the Russians continued to attack “purely civilian targets.” [“’Georgian Will Never Surrender’,” CNN News, 12 August 2008,http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/world/2008/08/12/sot.georgia.saakashvili.surrender.itn?iref=videosearch. Also, in his August 13 press conference, Saakashvili stated:

    “Russian tanks are attacking the town of Gori and rampaging through the town. There is marauding. There is destruction of buildings. There is marauding to the level that even toilet seats are taken from the buildings…computers, furniture. The worst kind of marauding I ever could imagine. There was a rampage through Georgian-controlled villages of South Ossetia and through upper Abkhazia – Kodori, and scores of people, according to the reports which we cannot totally confirm, were killed as well as the camps were set (up), women and men were separated from each other. Internment camps were set up, and we are getting reports of large-scale violation of human rights of the worst case (kind). … The town of Tskhinvali was turned into Grozny II by Russian carpet bombardment… I have been hearing accusations that this was Georgian bombardment, and this is not true. The leveling of the town of Tskhinvali was done by Russian air force…. What we are seeing in the area is classical Balkan-type and World war II-type ethnic cleasning and purification campaigns. …(T)he worst kind of atrocities are being committed in my country against my people of all ethnic groups.” [“Tensions Still High in Georgia,” CNN News, 13 August 2008,www.cnn.com/video/#/video/world/2008/08/13/sot.georgia.presser.saakashvili.ap?iref=videosearch.]

    Saakashvili’s ministers, like their leader, repeatedly asserted that Russians were routinely destroying residences, infrastructure, and ethnic Georgian civilians. Not unlike the Russians’ disinformation regarding Georgia’s ‘genocide’ of Ossetians, President Saakashvili and other top Geiorgian officials accused Russian forces of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Minister Yakobashvili told the Heritage Foundation that Russian forces had engaged in “ethnic cleansing” and inflicted “enormous atrocities, unbelievable suffering” on the Georgian population. In the following exchange, he went further by implying that no civilians had been killed by Georgian forces:

    MR. COHEN: Can I ask you a question about what happened in Ossetia? We are exposed here to the Russian position that the Georgian operation in South Ossetia on the 8th of August resulted in, quote, unquote, “genocide of the Ossetians” and “2,000 victims of the Georgian military operation.” Human Rights Watch, on the other hand, is saying that 45 South Ossetians, presumably civilians, died in that operation. What are the Georgian government figures on that?

    MIN. YAKOBASHVILI: Okay, let me clarify a couple of things. First of all, Human Rights Watch is talking about 45, but not civilian, but militants, because they were wearing the military uniform. [Transcript of a Heritage Foundation Forum on the Russian-Georgian War “A Challenge for the U.S. and the World,” Heritage Foundation, Washington DC, August 18, 2008, Federal News Service, August 18, 2008.]

    As of two weeks after hostilities ended no campaign of ethnic cleansing or atrocities and no internment camps have been found. There have been no reports of Russians “raping women and executing men,” as Saakashvili claimed. There were later reports of destruction and perhaps a few murders committed by Chechen battalions (irresponsibly sent by Moscow to fight on its behalf) and Ossetian militiamen. The alleged large scale killing, raping and internment camps have not been mentioned again by Saakashvili or any other Georgian official since the new ceasefire was established and Russia withdrew its troops from Georgia proper (excluding arounf the port of Poti). In terms of intentional bombing of civilian populations and ‘collateral damage,’ Human Rights Watch has concluded that evidence suggests most of the damage to residential Tskhinvali came from Georgian bombardment. HRW has reported one occasion in which Russian air forces appear to have used of cluster bombs, banned by international convention. However, the Georgian side’s official civilian death toll among Georgians as of August 25 was 69 as of August 25 with several hundred civilians wounded. [“Senior MP: 215 Killed in Conflict,” Civil.ge, 19 August 2008, 23:05www.civil.ge/eng/article.php?id=19215&search=civilians%20killed.] This hardly amounts to the massive Russian atrocities being claimed by Tbilisi. Georgian exaggeration and disinformation regarding the conduct of Russian troops and claims of massive and unprecedented atrocities led the Western mainstream media’s coverage. Thus in the first hours of the war on August 8, Sky News was reporting that invading Russian troops were “killing thousands.” The final death toll was approximately 400 plus on each side.

    RUSSIAN DESTRUCTION OF GEORGIA’S CIVILIAN INFRASTRUCTURE

    Saakashvili and his ministers repeatedly claimed that Russian forces were systematically destroying Georgia’s civilian infrastructure. At the Heritage Foundation Ambassador  Sikhuralidze stated Russia troops were “invading new towns, pillaging our villages and burning our national parks.” Minister Yakobashvili said: “They (the Russians) are, you know, throwing, firing bombs into Georgian forests and enflaming there and then sending helicopters to, you know, aggravate the flame and to use the helicopters as a front to inflict more damage…. (T)hey are building — blowing up bridges that connect Georgia — two parts of Georgia, and they have (blocked the line that ?) also connects Armenia to the rest of the world. So by blowing up these bridges and blockading the seaport at Poti, they have put Armenia in complete blockade, in complete blockade….(T)hey are going to the villages, looting villages, you know, and abusing people who are not complying with their demands, you know, taking furniture from their houses, lots of barbarian behavior….(P)ipelines were bombarded….by ballistic missiles….long-range, you know, 200-kilometer ballistic missiles. So Russia used these ballistic missiles to bomb international — (inaudible). And only by force of that, they were not able to hit this pipeline. But they definitely were targeting it….By blowing up the railroad bridge, they also disrupted the oil system from Azerbaijan. Lots of oil was going from Azerbaijan by the railroad.” [Transcript of a Heritage Foundation Forum on the Russian-Georgian War.]

    Reporters on the scene have reported a very different story regarding territories other than those attacked by the Georgians themselves. Borzou Daraghi wrote in the August 19 Los Angeles Times after visiting western Georgia on a tour organized by the Georgian government: “In west Georgia, few signs of damage by Russia” shows, the Russians in fact “used force minimally” and “avoided any inadvertent high-profile attacks on civilian targets.” “Early in the conflict, Georgian officials in Tbilisi warned of an impending disaster as Russian tanks from Abkhazia massed at Zugdidi’s edge. But residents said there had been little or no damage to their town.” [Borzou Daraghi, “In west Georgia, few signs of damage by Russia,” Los Angeles Times, August19, 2008.] Human rights organizations have reported no abuses by Russian troops, and some reports indicate rather exemplary behavior on the part of Russian soldiers. [See Saba Tsitsikhashvili, “The Ramifications of the Ten-Day Blockade of Georgia,”HumanRights.ge, 27 August 2008, http://www.humanrights.ge/index.php?a=article&id=3057&lang=en.

    Regarding the charge that the Russian military was set on burning Georegia’s forests, a Georgian newspaper noted that the Russian military set fire to forests during the occupation of Kartli because it was searching for Georgian artillery weapons that Georgian artillerymen hid there during the Georgian army’s retreat; a fact left out Minister Yakobashvili’s comments. [“Georgian artillery inflicted ‘heavy losses’ on Russians,” BBC Monitoring, August 25, 2008 translating Georgian weekly Kviris Palitra, August 25, 2008.]

    Russia did carry out a concerted bombing campaign to destroy Georgia’s military infrastructure in order to prevent Georgian forces from undertaking a counteroffensive and the resupply of the Georgian army by outside forces that might have chosen to support Tbilisi if the war dragged on.Even Russia’s air attacks on the port of Poti destroyed the military side of the port but left the civilian side intact. [Borzou Daraghi, “In west Georgia, few signs of damage by Russia,” Los Angeles Times, August19, 2008.]  Moreover, as the respected military studies journal Janes’ Defence Weekly reported on August 15, it was the Georgian army that targeted the residential capitol of South Ossetia with an indiscriminate, all night artillery barrage on 7-8 August with “notoriously imprecise” truck-borne GRAD missiles. [Richard Giragosian, “Georgian planning flaws led to campaign failure,” Janes’ Defence Weekly, August 15, 2008 in Johnson’s Russia List, #152, August 19, 2008,http://www.cdi.org/russia/johnsonwww.org

    RUSSIAN TROOPS ENCIRCLING TBILISI

    “On Wednesday, August 13, Saakashvili said in an interview on CNN that Russian troops were ‘closing on the capital, circling,’ and planning to install their own government in Tbilisi. Associated Press journalists in the area reported “no sign of an impending coup.” An AP reporter did see dozens of Russian trucks and armored vehicles heading south from the central city of Gori in the direction of Tbilisi, but they later turned away. [See Misha Dzhindzhikhashvili, “Georgian president’s Russia claims raise eyebrows,”Associated Press, 13 August 2008, 8:12.] The Russians undertook no military operations against the Georgian capitol throughout the five-day war.

    U.S. IS TAKING OVER GEORGIA’S PORT AND AIRPORTS

    Saakashvili claimed on Georgian national television that the arrival of U.S. military cargo plane carrying humanitarian aid “means that Georgia’s ports and airports will be taken under the control of the U.S. Defense Department.” Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell immediately refuted this: “We have no need, nor do we intend to take over any Georgian air or seaport to deliver humanitarian aid. … We have no designs on taking control of any Georgian facility.” [Dzhindzhikhashvili, “Georgian president’s Russia claims raise eyebrows.”]

    RUSSIA HAS LOST MORE PLANES THAN IN ANY CONFLICT IN ITS HISTORY

    In his Wednesday, August 13 television address, he said, “Russia has lost more airplanes than in any conflict of this scale since 1939.” The entire Soviet air force was destroyed in the first days of Hitler’s invasion of the USSR, and in the present war Russia is claiming the loss of four airplanes. [Dzhindzhikhashvili, “Georgian president’s Russia claims raise eyebrows.”]

    RUSSIA WILL BOMB TBILISI DEMONSTRATION

    Saakashvili also mentioned supposed rumors that Russia would bomb the August 12 rally in Tbilisi, but there was no bombing. [Dzhindzhikhashvili, “Georgian president’s Russia claims raise eyebrows”]. It never happened.

    GEORGIAN PROPOSING AUTONOMY TO SOUTH OSSETIA AND ABKHAZIA

    Saakashvili claimed: “Georgia has been proposing 21st-century, European solutions for South Ossetia, including full autonomy guaranteed by the international community. Russia has responded with crude, 19th-century methods” [Saakashvili, “Russia’s War Is The West’s Challenge”]. Saakhashvili’s representation is gravely overstated. Throughout most of the some twenty years since South Ossetia and Abkhazia demanded first internal autonomy in Georgia and then independence from it, Georgia rejected internal autonomy. The crisis began when ultra-nationalist Georgian president Zviad Gamsakhurdia repealed these breakaway republics’ former status as autonomous republics within the Georgian SSR. After Georgians inflicted violence on the two republics and they achieved de facto independence did Georgia make tentative offers of internal autonomy. For most of Saakashvili’s term, he emphasized reintegrating the republics without offering a plan but refusing the rejection of the use of force. Only early this year did he propose a plan for internal autonomy for the republics as Georgian forces continued to break the ceasefire agreement by placing heavy artillery in the conflict zone and to refuse to reject the use of force.

    RUSSIA BOMBING OIL BTC OIL PIPELINE

    Yakobashvili’s cleverly piqued the conference’s American fears that Russian forces sought to interdict the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline by saying that the Russians had repeatedly tried to bomb it. Westerners are to believe here that a Russian force, including sophisiticated fighter jets and 1,200-3,000 tanks and armored personnel carriers, was unable in the course of five days to bomb an oil pipeline. [Transcript of a Heritage Foundation Forum on the Russian-Georgian War.]

    CYBER WAR

    Minister Yakobashvili and other Georgian officials claimed that Russian authorities initiated a large-scale cyber-attack on Georgian government websites before and during the war. [Transcript of a Heritage Foundation Forum on the Russian-Georgian War.] Experts on cyber warfare have cast grave doubt over the Georgian authorities’ claims that the Russian military or intelligence agencies conducted cyber warfare in the run-up to Moscow’s incursion. Rather, independent hacker networks attacked Georgian websites earlier this month previously targeted pornography and gambling sites as part of an extortion racket. Moreover, these attacks were only launched after Georgian forces engaged Russia forces broke out. [Shaun Waterman, “Analysis: Russia-Georgia cyberwar doubted,” United Press International, Aug. 18, 2008.] Moreover, two days before Georgia’s August 7 assault on Tskhinvali, Georgian hackers and perhaps Georgian cyber-war targeted South Ossetia. Following a report on South Ossetian television that 29 Georgian authorities were covering up the killing of 29 Georgian servicemen during the exchange of fire between Ossetian and Georgian forces on August 1-2 that marked a sharp escalation in the tit-for-tat attacks, sites of the analytical publication ‘Ossetian Radio and Television’ were subverted by hackers. [Osetinskie saity atakovany khakerami posle publikatsii o tainykh pokhoronakh gruzinskikh soldat,” Regnum.ru, 5 August 2008, http://www.regnum.ru-news/1036460.html.

    CONCLUSION

    American support for Georgia in the present crisis is based in part on the belief that Russia is to be blame for instigating this war. Much of this belief is founded on Saakashvili’s and other Geoergian officials’ statements to American officials like the State Department’s Matthew Bryza. Western publics and decisionmakers should not take the statements of Georgian officials regarding this war or much of anything else at face value. They should think twice and then thrice about whether backing President Saakashvili, his aspirations for Georgian membership in NATO, and the resulting ‘hot peace’ with Moscow are in the West’s interests.

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