Nov 15
After gaining exclusive access to South Ossetia, Tim Whewell has discovered evidence Georgia may have committed war crimes in its attack on its breakaway region in August.
Source: BBC
Tags: Georgia, Politics, South Ossetia
Nov 15
(Dmitry Astahov/AFP/Getty Images)
Vladimir Putin reportedly wanted to hang President Saakashvili “like the Americans hanged Saddam”
Nicolas Sarkozy saved the President of Georgia from being hanged “by the balls” - a threat made last summer by Vladimir Putin, according to an account that emerged yesterday from the Élysée Palace.
The Russian Prime Minister had revealed his plans for disposing of Mr Saakashvili when Mr Sarkozy was in Moscow in August to broker a ceasefire in Georgia.
Jean-David Levitte, Mr Sarkozy’s chief diplomatic adviser, reported the exchange in a news magazine before an EU-Russia summit today. The meeting will be chaired by the French leader and President Medvedev.
With Russian tanks only 30 miles from Tbilisi on August 12, Mr Sarkozy told Mr Putin that the world would not accept the overthrow of Georgia’s Government. According to Mr Levitte, the Russian seemed unconcerned by international reaction. “I am going to hang Saakashvili by the balls,” Mr Putin declared.
Mr Sarkozy thought he had misheard. “Hang him?” - he asked. “Why not?” Mr Putin replied. “The Americans hanged Saddam Hussein.”
Mr Sarkozy, using the familiar tu, tried to reason with him: “Yes but do you want to end up like [President] Bush?” Mr Putin was briefly lost for words, then said: “Ah - you have scored a point there.”
Mr Saakashvili, who was in Paris to meet Mr Sarkozy yesterday, laughed nervously when a French radio station read him the exchange. “I knew about this scene, but not all the details. It’s funny, all the same,” he said.
Tags: France, Georgia, Government, Mikhail Saakashvili, Nicolas Sarkozy, Politics, Russia, Vladimir Putin
Nov 14
![[Belarus]](http://s.wsj.net/public/resources/images/NA-AT976_BELARU_D_20081113181340.jpg)
President Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus, left, who met Oct. 26 near Moscow with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, says that Belarus would like to deploy missiles even if it doesn’t reach an agreement with Moscow.
MINSK, Belarus — President Alexander Lukashenko is in talks with Moscow about placing in Belarus advanced Iskander missiles that could hit targets deep inside Europe.
The talks raise the ante in the debate over a U.S. plan to deploy missile defense in Europe. They also complicate Western hopes for warmer ties with Belarus, which some in the U.S. and Europe hope could help to counterbalance an increasingly hostile Kremlin.
In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Lukashenko said that he would like to see closer relations with the West but that he sympathizes with Russia on two flashpoints that have rocked relations — the conflict in Georgia and U.S. plans to place antimissile systems in Europe to counter a potential threat from Iran.
Mr. Lukashenko said he “absolutely supports” Russia’s plans to place Iskander missiles in Kaliningrad that would target the U.S. missile system. Kaliningrad is a Russian enclave in Europe that borders NATO members Poland and Lithuania, and missiles there could reach the proposed U.S. missile sites in Poland.
Mr. Lukashenko said Russia also had proposed putting Iskander missiles in Belarus, which is situated between Russia and Poland. And if a deal on the issue isn’t reached, Belarus itself would like to deploy the missiles, he said.
“Even if Russia does not offer these promising missiles, we will purchase them ourselves,” said Mr. Lukashenko, who said the technology for the Iskander optics and fire-control systems comes from Belarus. “Right now we do not have the funds, but it is part of our plans — I am giving away a secret here — to have such weapons.”
Tags: Abkhazia, Belarus, Georgia, Iran, Military, Missiles, NATO, Politics, Russia, South Ossetia, U.S.
Nov 09
Two former British military officers are expected to give crucial evidence against Georgia when an international inquiry is convened to establish who started the country’s bloody five-day war with Russia in August.
Ryan Grist, a former British Army captain, and Stephen Young, a former RAF wing commander, are said to have concluded that, before the Russian bombardment began, Georgian rockets and artillery were hitting civilian areas in the breakaway region of South Ossetia every 15 or 20 seconds.
Their accounts seem likely to undermine the American-backed claims of President Mikhail Saakashvili of Georgia that his little country was the innocent victim of Russian aggression and acted solely in self-defence.
During the war both Grist and Young were senior figures in the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). The organisation had deployed teams of unarmed monitors to try to reduce tension over South Ossetia, which had split from Georgia in a separatist struggle in the early 1990s with Russia’s support.
On the night war broke out, Grist was the senior OSCE official in Georgia. He was in charge of unarmed monitors who became trapped by the fighting. Based on their observations, Grist briefed European Union diplomats in Tbilisi, the Georgian capital, with his assessment of the conflict.
Grist, who resigned from the OSCE shortly afterwards, has told The New York Times it was Georgia that launched the first military strikes against Tskhinvali, the South Ossetian capital.
“It was clear to me that the [Georgian] attack was completely indiscriminate and disproportionate to any, if indeed there had been any, provocation,” he said. “The attack was clearly, in my mind, an indiscriminate attack on the town, as a town.”
Tags: Georgia, Government, Mikhail Saakashvili, Military, OSCE, Politics, Russia, South Ossetia, U.S., War
Nov 05
Nov. 5 (Bloomberg) — Russian leader Dmitry Medvedev said he would deploy new missiles in Europe, confronting the U.S. on the day Barack Obama was declared the winner in America’s presidential election.
Medvedev said he would place a short-range missile system designed to carry conventional warheads in Russia’s exclave of Kaliningrad, wedged between Poland and Lithuania.
“An Iskander rocket system will be deployed in the Kaliningrad region to neutralize the missile-defense system if necessary,” Medvedev said, referring to U.S. plans to place elements of a missile shield in Poland and the Czech Republic.
Medvedev blamed the U.S. for failure to coordinate its economic policy with other countries so that a “local” crisis turned into a global one, leading to “a fall on the markets of the whole planet.” He also renewed his assertion that the U.S. provoked the war between Russia and Georgia in August.
Tags: China, Dmitry Medvedev, financial crisis, Georgia, India, Lithuania, Mikhail Saakashvili, Military, missile shield, NATO, Poland, Politics, Russia, South Ossetia
Oct 29
Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page and Contributing Editor of National Review. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions. He can be reached at: PaulCraigRoberts@yahoo.com
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The Defanging of America: Reality-Based Community Overthrows History’s Actors
“We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality - judiciously, as you will - we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.” Bush White House aide explaining the New Reality
The New American Century lasted a decade. Financial crisis and defeated objectives in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Georgia brought the neoconservative project for American world hegemony crashing to a close in the autumn of 2008.
The American neoconservatives are the heirs of Leon Trotsky. Their dream of American “Full Spectrum Dominance”–US military and economic superiority over any possible combination of states–is matched in ambition only by the early 20th century Trotskyite dream of world Communist revolution.
The neocons used September 11, 2001, as a “new Pearl Harbor” to give power precedence over law domestically and internationally. The executive branch no longer had to obey federal statutes, such as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act or honor international treaties, such as the Geneva Conventions. An asserted “terrorist threat” to national security became the cloak which hid US imperial interests as the Bush Regime set about dismantling US civil liberties and the existing order of international law constructed by previous governments during the post-war era.
Perhaps the neoconservative project for world hegemony would have lasted a bit longer had the neocons possessed intellectual competence.
On the war front, the incompetent neocons predicted that the Iraq war would be a six-week cakewalk, whose $70 billion cost would be paid out of Iraqi oil revenues. President Bush fired White House economist Larry Lindsey for estimating that the war would cost $200 billion. The current estimate by experts is that the Iraq war has cost American taxpayers between two and three trillion dollars. And the six-week war is now the six-year war.
Tags: 9/11, Afghanistan, Bush administration, civil liberties, civil rights, Economy, financial crisis, Geneva Conventions, George Bush, Georgia, Government, Iran, Iraq, Israel, law, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Military, NATO, Neoconservatives, New World Order, Politics, Russia, South Ossetia, Surveillance, Taliban, taxpayers, U.S., War
Oct 19
MOSCOW (AP) - Police in South Ossetia are under orders to shoot back if they come under fire from Georgian forces - a directive that could increase the threat of new violence in the Russian-backed separatist region.
South Ossetia’s top police official issued the order Saturday after a police post came under automatic weapons fire Saturday from an ethnic Georgian village, the separatist government said on its Web site.
Acting Interior Minister Mikhail Mindzayev said nobody was hurt by the gunfire but he called it part of a series of provocations by Georgians forces.
“We will not allow our people and our officers to be killed,” Mindzayev said in a statement on the site.
Georgian Interior Ministry spokesman Shota Utiashvili denied Georgian forces fired at a South Ossetian post and said Nikozi came under fire early Saturday from South Ossetian-controlled territory.
Tags: Georgia, Government, Politics, South Ossetia
Oct 04
Oct. 4 (Bloomberg) — The Russian Defense Ministry said an explosion in separatist South Ossetia that killed seven Russian military personnel, including a senior officer, was intended to break a cease-fire with Georgia.
The ministry “regards this event as a carefully planned terrorist attack aimed at breaking off the fulfillment of all sides’ obligations under the Medvedev-Sarkozy plan,” according to a statement posted on its Web site late yesterday. South Ossetian leader Eduard Kokoity blamed Georgia for the blast.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy, whose country holds the rotating European Union presidency, brokered the cease-fire that ended a five-day war between Russia and Georgia over South Ossetia in August. On Sept. 8, Sarkozy and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev agreed on a timetable for the withdrawal of Russian troops from buffer zones that extend into Georgia from South Ossetia and another breakaway region, Abkhazia.
Tags: Abkhazia, Georgia, Military, Politics, Russia, South Ossetia
Sep 21
Dmitry Medvedev, the Russian president, yesterday vowed to defy Western attempts to isolate Moscow as he gave his backing to an ambitious re-armament programme.
Both Mr Medvedev and Vladimir Putin, the prime minister, resorted to the language of the Cold War as they pledged to increase defence spending by 50 per cent over the next three years.
But they also sought to portray Russia as the victim of Nato aggression.
As his parliament gave its support to the higher defence budget, Mr Medvedev accused the United States and its allies of seeking to isolate Russia behind “thick walls and an iron curtain.”
Tags: Dmitry Medvedev, Georgia, Government, Military, NATO, Politics, Russia, U.S., Vladimir Putin
Sep 18
AFP Photo/US Navy/ Peter Scheu
The U.S. military could have plans to use Georgian air bases to launch air strikes against Iran, according to Russia’s envoy to NATO Dmitry Rogozin. He pointed out that Georgia would be the perfect base for a potential U.S. operation in Iran.
Speaking in Brussels, Dmitry Rogozin said:
“What NATO is doing now in Georgia is restoring its ability to monitor its airspace, in other words restoring the whole locator system and an anti-missile defence system which were destroyed by Russian artillery. Now these systems are being restored as soon as possible. We have unconfirmed information that American ships under cover of himanitarian aid have delivered all the equipment necessary for the restoration of these systems.”
He noted that there it is impossible that these preparations are designed for Georgia’s protection against Russia, since the war in the Caucasus is over and all the security measures in South Ossetia and Abkhazia are being pursued.
“It’s done for logistical support of some air operations either of the alliance as a whole or of the United States in particular in this region. The swift reconstruction of the airfields and all the systems proves that some air operation is being planned against another country which is located not far from Georgia. What country could it be? Which country is in the spotlight now? Of course it’s Iran, there are no other countries,” the envoy said.
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Tags: Georgia, Government, IAEA, Iran, Middle East, Military, NATO, nuclear, Nuclear weapons, Politics, Russia, U.N., U.S., uranium
