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Tbilisi admits it was Russian roulette
Georgia did not believe Russia would respond to its offensive in South Ossetia and was completely unprepared for the counter-attack, the country's deputy defence minister has admitted.
- Financial Times
- Published: 23:51 August 22, 2008
Tbilisi: Georgia did not believe Russia would respond to its offensive in South Ossetia and was completely unprepared for the counter-attack, the country's deputy defence minister has admitted.
Batu Kutelia said Georgia had made the decision to seize the South Ossetian capital of Tskhinvali despite the fact that its forces did not have enough anti-tank and air defences to protect themselves in the event of serious resistance.
"Unfortunately, we attached a low priority to this," Kutelia said, sitting at a desk with the flags of Georgia and Nato (to which Georgia does not belong) crossed behind him. "We did not prepare for this kind of eventuality."
The Georgian military reckoned chances of a Russian counter-attack were very low despite the ruthless manner in which Moscow put down the Chechens on the other side of the Caucasus in two wars during the 1990s and the fact that separatists in South Ossetia and Abkhazia had Russian backing.
Georgian forces were thus taken completely by surprise when the Russian incursion came, Kutelia said. "I didn't think it likely that a member of the UN Security Council and the OSCE [Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe] would react like this," he said.
His incredulity was echoed by David Darchiashvili, head of the parliamentary European integration committee. "No one expected Russia would mobilise and invade," he said.
Georgia's 20,000-man army, built up at a cost of $2 billion (Dh7.3 billion) with the help of US trainers and cast-off Warsaw Pact equipment, was organised to deal with "brushfire" wars with separatist enclaves on its borders and to contribute to missions such as Iraq as a way of shoring up Georgia's ties with the West, not to do battle with Russia.
Kutelia still blamed the Russians and their South Ossetian allies for the war, saying that Ossetian fighters had begun shelling Georgian positions and villages in early August.
He said Russia had begun moving heavy armour through the Roki tunnel from North Ossetia before Mikheil Saakashvili, Georgia's president, ordered the offensive against the South Ossetian capital of Tskhinvali on August 7, but offered no evidence to back this up.
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