Strongman (33 page)

Saakashvili said he left the meeting ‘full of hope’ and that Medvedev had suggested getting together in Sochi to ‘sit down and look at the different options’. But he did
not mention that – as Sergei Lavrov points out – the prerequisite for any progress, as far as Russia was concerned, was that Georgia, given its stated intention to regain the two
territories, should sign a non-use-of-force pledge. In an interview, Medvedev’s diplomatic adviser Sergei Prikhodko confirmed: ‘The key thing was a proposal to put together a document
on non-use of force. They even named the venue where it could happen, in Sochi. Saakashvili reacted, as far as I recall, quite positively.’
¹⁷

But the question of a non-use-of-force agreement would bedevil relations over the next months. Saaskashvili says the Russians wanted Georgia to sign such an agreement with the Abkhaz and South
Ossetians – with the Russians as guarantors. But for Saakashvili that was ‘like giving a fox a mandate to guard a chicken house’. He would only agree to sign a non-use-of-force
agreement with the Russians. But the Russians responded: why should we do that? We are not combatants in the area, we only have peacekeepers there.

Both men agreed that there was no point in meeting until they had narrowed their differences sufficiently for there to be a practical outcome. In the middle of June they exchanged confidential
letters, which I have seen. Saakashvili sent Medvedev what he believed were a few helpful proposals to reduce tension in Abkhazia, but his letter – and Medvedev’s reply – revealed
fundamental disagreements. Saakashvili proposed the removal of Russian peacekeepers from the areas of Abkhazia closest to Georgia, and the return of Georgian refugees to these areas (Gali and
Ochamchira) which would be jointly administered by Georgia and Abkhazia. Only after this (in December, Saakashvili conjectured) could there be an agreement on the non-use of force, and on the
return of Georgian refugees to the rest of Abkhazia. As a sweetener, Saakashvili offered Georgia’s help in preparing the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, which is just north of Abkhazia –
but in the meantime he called for the ‘rapid withdrawal’ of Russian military reinforcements and the annulment of Putin’s directive of 16 April upgrading relations with the
breakaway regions. In his reply Medvedev welcomed the offer to help with the Sochi Games, but politely rejected everything else as pie in the sky. It was hard to imagine, he said, joint
Georgian–Abkhaz administration of any part of Abkhazia, and it was premature to speak of the return of refugees. The priority was for Georgia to take real measures to reduce tension, and,
above all, to sign a non-use-of-force agreement with the Abkhaz side and to withdraw Georgian troops from the Kodori Valley. If Saakashvili would agree to that, Medvedev offered a summit meeting to
sign the relevant documents in July or August.

The Russians tried to work through the Americans to put pressure on their ally. Sergei Lavrov called Condoleezza Rice and said: ‘Saakashvili is playing with fire. Keep him away from
adventuring. Convince him to sign an agreement for non-use of force.’

Rice replied, according to Lavrov: ‘Sergei, don’t worry. He wants to be a member of NATO. He knows very well that if he uses force, he can forget about NATO.’ Rice remembers
the conversation. She says she even added: ‘It will be another generation before they are in NATO if they use force.’ But she also told the Russians that their own menacing actions were
making it ‘difficult for Saakashvili in terms of domestic audiences to sign a no-use-of-force pledge’.

Medvedev and Saakashvili had one more encounter before war became inevitable. It was a steamy Saturday night in Astana, the capital of Kazakhstan. The next day, 6 July, was President Nursultan
Nazarbayev’s birthday, and he had brought exalted guests from many countries to an exclusive nightclub to celebrate. Medvedev had declined to meet Saakashvili for formal talks, but the
Georgian approached him several times. Medvedev recalled later: ‘He’s a difficult man to avoid, because if he wants to get hold of you he sticks to you! We talked while sitting on a
bus, and we talked while taking a walk in the park. In the evening we went out for a cup of tea and a glass of wine ... we sat on a sofa and kept discussing the prospect of a meeting.’

The two men have different, and contradictory, memories of these conversations. Since it appears to have been a crucial moment in the breakdown of communication, leading a month later to war,
the two versions deserve to be told.

Saakashvili says that he pressed for a follow-up summit in Sochi, as discussed at St Petersburg, but that Medvedev was evasive and hinted he was not in control: ‘He said, “You know,
I’m so pleased to be with you here, and we are listening to the same music, we like the same social environment, we are at ease with each other. In many ways we might have the same
background, but back in Moscow there are different rules of the game, and I would not be easily understood if I rushed to a meeting with you now.”

‘And I said, “Look, a meeting is better than no meetings and we should get somewhere.” But he said, “A meeting now will be a disappointment because we will not get
anywhere, and we might come off even worse than before.” And I tell him, “Dmitry, come on, what could be worse than we have now? We have daily provocations, things are really spiralling
out of control, we have these incidents on the ground, it cannot get any worse.” And here he stopped me and said, “Well, I think you are deeply mistaken here. You will see, very soon,
it might get much, much worse.” And then he basically turned around and left.’

It must be stressed that Saakashvili was speaking with the benefit of hindsight – after the war that broke out one month later. One must also remember that he has a mission to shape the
history of those events to his own advantage. But he implied two interesting things: first, that Medvedev had indicated he was not fully in charge of policy (this is credible, given that Medvedev
had been in office for only two months), and, second, that he had hinted darkly that Russia was planning military action (though Medvedev’s words can also be read as simply meaning that
events were spinning out of control). The important thing, when piecing together the events that led to war, is that Saakashvili
interpreted
Medvedev’s words as a threat – which
he might have been tempted to forestall.

Saakashvili concludes his story of the nightclub encounter somewhat melodramatically. ‘Apparently I was looking nervous. Nazarbayev came to me and said, “Misha, what’s wrong
with you? I’ve never seen you so pale – what did he tell you?” I said, “Nothing.” And then he said, “Don’t worry, things will be sorted out, you know, give
him some time, I’m sure you can find a way.” ’
¹⁸

In an interview with Ekho Moskvy three years after the war, Saakashvili said that after Astana he tried repeatedly to call Medvedev but was always told: ‘Wait. We’ll call you when
it’s time.’ Saakashvili interprets Medvedev’s evasiveness as proof that ‘he was no longer inclined to have a serious conversation’ because ‘he knew what could
[be about to] happen’.
¹⁹

Medvedev’s account is entirely different. He says the two did agree to meet again for ‘a serious discussion’ in Sochi, but Saakashvili then went ominously quiet. ‘I can
tell you earnestly: I spent the next month checking regularly for any feedback from our Georgian counterpart. There was nothing.’ Both Medvedev and three other senior Russians all made the
same point in interviews (clearly it is the conclusion they reached in their internal discussions later): that Saakashvili, for whatever reason, fell silent after he was visited by Condoleezza Rice
in Tbilisi four days later. Medvedev said: ‘Following that visit, my Georgian colleague simply dropped all communications with us. He simply stopped talking to us, he stopped writing letters
and making phone calls. It was apparent that he had some new plans now.’
²⁰

It is undeniable that Rice sent mixed signals during her visit – indeed she says so herself. She flew to Georgia on 9 July. The day before, the Russians had engaged in a little more
sabre-rattling – flying warplanes over South Ossetia ‘to cool hot heads in Tbilisi’, as the foreign ministry put it. Dining in the Kopala restaurant, on a veranda overlooking the
Mtkvari river, Rice again insisted to the Georgian leader that he had to reject the use of force.

‘Why should I do that?’ he replied. ‘I will get nothing for it.’

Rice replied: ‘You’re going to have to do it, you have no option ... If you engage Russian forces, nobody will come to your aid and you will lose.’
²¹
Her tough words in private, though, gave way in her public statements to what Saakashvili may have seen as encouragement for his plans. At a press conference before leaving
Tbilisi, Rice strongly endorsed Georgia’s territorial integrity and criticised Russia, adding, ‘We take very, very strongly our obligation to help our allies defend themselves, and no
one should be confused about that.’ In an interview Rice said this was no idle promise: ‘It was very important for the Georgians to know that if they did the difficult things, the
United States would stand by them, if the Russians didn’t stand by
their
obligations. And I absolutely, deliberately – in front of the press – said that the United States
would stand by Georgia.’

The Russians, it seems, believe that Saakashvili heard in this the encouragement he needed. Medvedev says: ‘I don’t believe the Americans
urged
Georgia’s president to
invade. But I do believe that there were certain subtleties and certain hints made ... which could effectively feed Saakashvili’s apparent hopes that the Americans would back him in any
conflict. In politics, connotations and nuances are very important.’

In short, Medvedev believes Saakashvili took encouragement from Rice’s words and decided to invade South Ossetia, and therefore stopped communicating with Moscow. Saakashvili believes
Medvedev stopped communicating because he had been told to shut up by Putin, who had already taken a decision to invade Georgia. Whatever the truth, there was now silence, and therefore little hope
of avoiding war through diplomacy.

A few days later, the Russian 58th Army began massive military exercises across the whole of the North Caucasus, involving 8,000 troops, 700 combat vehicles and 30 aircraft. At the same time
1,630 US and Georgian forces conducted military exercises in Georgia called ‘Immediate Response 2008’. Remarkably, despite the tension and continuing skirmishes in South Ossetia, the
leaderships in both Georgia and Russia appeared to think the situation was calm enough to go on holiday. One senior American who visited Tbilisi in July recalls having dinner with members of the
Georgian leadership before they went away, Saakashvili to a health farm in Italy, deputy foreign minister Bokeria to Spain: ‘They were pretty happy, and totally relaxed, hugging each other
with “see you in a month or three weeks, make sure you don’t think about work!” ’

In the first week of August almost the entire Russian leadership also went on holiday, just as the worst Georgian–Ossetian skirmishes in four years erupted in South Ossetia. In the next
days thousands of Ossetians evacuated their families to the safety of North Ossetia. On Wednesday 5 August an official in the Russian government gloomily told me it was not a question of
‘whether’ there would be war: ‘There
will
be war.’ It erupted finally on the night of 7–8 August, with a massive Georgian assault on the South Ossetian capital,
Tskhinvali, followed by a Russian invasion that swarmed deep into Georgia, far beyond the confines of the disputed region itself. The war was almost universally blamed – at least at first
– on Russia, and comparisons were drawn with the Soviet invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia. Russia’s reputation suffered its greatest blow since the end of communism, though a
European Union commission which was set up to investigate the war apportioned blame more evenly, concluding that Georgia aggressed first, with force that was not ‘justifiable under
international law’. The report also said that both sides had contributed to the build-up of tensions beforehand, and that Russia’s reaction was disproportionate, going ‘beyond the
reasonable limits of self-defence’.

The war and its consequences

President Saakashvili, who had announced a ceasefire at 19:00 on 7 August, ordered his forces to attack Tskhinvali at 23:35. A huge artillery bombardment, using tanks,
howitzers and Grad multiple-rocket launchers, destroyed swathes of the city and caused many civilian casualties. Georgian ground troops moved in. Russian peacekeepers were killed, as well as many
Ossetians, who by virtue of Putin’s ‘passportisation’ policy were now Russian citizens. The Russians evoked ‘genocide’, claiming 2,000 civilians had been killed in the
Georgian attack, a figure that proved to be grossly exaggerated. The next day hundreds of Russian tanks poured through the Roki tunnel, with massive air support. Over the next five days 40,000
Russian troops entered Georgia, half of them through South Ossetia, the others through Abkhazia. They quickly drove Georgian forces out of Tskhinvali and proceeded into Georgia proper, bombarding
the city of Gori, attacking airfields and army bases across the country, and even destroying the port of Poti, many miles from the disputed areas. Hundreds of thousands of Georgians fled their
homes as Russian forces headed south towards the capital, Tbilisi. In Gori, South Ossetian militias rampaged through the empty city, while Russian troops turned a blind eye. Eventually,
international diplomacy brought hostilities to a halt, and the Russian advance stopped. The five-day war left 850 dead and 35,000 people displaced from their homes.

Such are the basic facts, but how and why it all started was, and remains, a subject of bitter dispute. Shortly after the initial assault on Tskhinvali, Georgia’s military commander,
Mamuka Kurashvili, appeared to confirm that President Saakashvili had decided to press ahead with his long-held desire to re-conquer South Ossetia, when he told reporters that Georgia had
‘decided to restore constitutional order in the entire region’. It was later said that this statement had not been authorised, though Saakashvili himself announced that ‘a large
part of Tskhinvali is now
liberated
’. The Georgians later tried to justify their actions by claiming that they had resorted to force only to counter a huge Russian invasion that was
already under way, but most observers (including the EU mission) say there is no evidence of a large-scale Russian invasion in the hours before the Georgian attack. Indeed Saakashvili himself did
not make such a claim at the time, and the Georgian government told a UN Security Council session on 8 August that ‘at 05:30 [that day] the
first
Russian troops entered South Ossetia
through the Roki tunnel’. In interviews conducted two years later with several members of the Georgian government, they seemed hopelessly confused about the timeline.