Georgian-South Ossetian conflict

[Yedtarts]

Re: Georgian-South Ossetian conflict

On August 12, 2008, Pravda ridiculed Bush, “Bush: Why don’t you shut up.”

Americans may think they are a superpower before whose presence the world trembles. But not the Russians.
Those Americans stupid enough to think that America’s “superpower” insures its citizens from danger need to read the total contempt shown for President Bush in Pravda:

“President Bush,
Why don’t you shut up? In your statement on Monday regarding the legitimate actions of the Russian Federation in Georgia, you failed to mention the war crimes perpetrated by Georgian military forces, which American advisors support, against Russian and Ossetian civilians

“President Bush,
Why don’t you shut up? Your faithful ally, Mikhail Saakashvili, was announcing a ceasefire deal while his troops, with your advisors, were massing on Ossetia’s border, which they crossed under cover of night and destroyed Tskhinvali, targeting civilian structures just like your forces did in Iraq.

“President Bush,
Why don’t you shut up? Your American transport aircraft gave a ride home to thousands of Georgian soldiers from Iraq directly into the combat zone.

“President Bush,
Why don’t you shut up? How do you account for the fact that among the Georgian soldiers fleeing the fighting yesterday you could clearly hear officers using American English giving orders to “Get back inside” and how do you account for the fact that there are reports of American soldiers among the Georgian casualties?

“President Bush,
Why don’t you shut up? Do you really think anyone gives any importance whatsoever to your words after 8 years of your criminal and murderous regime and policies? Do you really believe you have any moral ground whatsoever and do you really imagine there is a single human being anywhere on this planet who does not stick up his middle finger every time you appear on a TV screen?
Do you really believe you have the right to give any opinion or advice after Abu Ghraib? After Guantanamo? After the massacre of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi citizens? After the torture by CIA operatives?
Do you really believe you have any right to make a statement on any point of international law after your trumped-up charges against Iraq and the subsequent criminal invasion?

“President Bush,
Why don’t you shut up? Suppose Russia for instance declares that Georgia has weapons of mass destruction? And that Russia knows where these WMD are, namely in Tblisi and Poti and north, south, east and west of there? And that it must be true because there is ‘magnificent foreign intelligenc’ such as satellite photos of milk powder factories and baby cereals producing chemical weapons and which are currently being ‘driven around the country in vehicles’? Suppose Russia declares for instance that ‘Saakashvili stiffed the world’ and it is ‘time for regime change?

Nice and simple, isn’t it, President Bush?“
So, why don’t you shut up? Oh and by the way, send some more of your military advisors to Georgia, they are doing a sterling job. And they look all funny down the night sight, all green.”

The US is not a superpower. It is a bankrupt farce run by imbeciles who were installed by stolen elections arranged by Karl Rove and Diebold. It is a laughing stock, that ignorantly affronts and attempts to bully an enormous country equipped with tens of thousands of nuclear weapons.

[yerazhishda]

Re: Georgian-South Ossetian conflict

YouTube - Russia mourns victims of Ossetian bloodshed

Did you see the kid at 1:30? He was rattling off about Ossetian history and the current conflict like it was nothing!

[North Pole]

Re: Georgian-South Ossetian conflict

The Kremlin, Moscow

Beginning of the Meeting on Providing Humanitarian Assistance to the Population of South Ossetia

PRESIDENT OF RUSSIA DMITRY MEDVEDEV: In connection with the act of aggression committed by Georgia against the civilian population of South Ossetia and Russian peacekeepers, there are many complex humanitarian problems that we must deal with, in accordance with our mandate and simply in light of our duty as a nation.

Today we must consider how to provide assistance to the civilian populations and to the wounded, including, of course, medical assistance, immigration issues, and think about how we can accommodate refugees. We also need to look at the way the situation develops in a comprehensive way, given that it is a very difficult one.

And I would like to hear each of you report on what you have done and the suggestions you have on how to overcome existing humanitarian problems.


DEPUTY PRIME MINISTER SERGEI SOBYANIN: Dmitry Anatolyevich, in accordance with your orders yesterday to the government cabinet we have held several meetings to provide humanitarian assistance to victims in South Ossetia.

We have organized two facilities: a central headquarters in the Emergencies Situations Ministry [ESM] and in Vladikavkaz, where the representatives of all relevant ministries, departments and regional authorities have assembled . Yesterday we sent the necessary supplies -- I am referring to the fact that a hospital has been deployed by the ESM, to which we have sent the necessary medications and first aid.

In the past few days, as of the second or third [of August], more than twenty thousand people have made requests to the Federal Migration Service. Only in the past day and a half more than thirty thousand people have crossed the border. We really have a humanitarian catastrophe on our hands.

All refugees who contact us receive due assistance and have been reserved a place in children's camps, in places of temporary residence. Not one person has seen their request denied.

I think that Sergei Kuzhugetovich [Shoigu] has more information to report.


EMERGENCY SITUATIONS MINISTER SERGEI SHOIGU: Today the situation is as follows. We have started to allocate people to temporary accommodation in the Southern Federal District. To date twelve regions have the capacity to accommodate three and a half thousand people and this work continues. I think that by the end of the day we will have the capacity to house ten thousand people in permanent accommodation. In addition, we have deployed tented accommodation for two million people near the border points.

The situation is compounded by the fact that at present there is no water in Tskhinvali, in practice the water and sewage treatment plants have been destroyed. I am referring to those facilities used for treating water, drinking water.

In light of this fact we are putting together a shipment for water purification. Given the lack of electricity, I think that today by 4 pm we will deliver generators to Vladikavkaz, and by the day to Tskhinvali. We have set ourselves the task to determine the power necessary to run the systems that support civilian life by 12 o’clock -- I am referring to things such as medicine, water facilities again, and businesses engaged in baking bread.


The hospital which said Sergey Semenovich [Sobyanin] mentioned has been deployed, set up, and is ready to receive victims of the fighting. There is a need for additional medications and doctors, but I think that Tatyana Alekseevna will better be able to talk about this.

We can add to this the fact that already last night a substantial amount of food and disposable items were shipped off. By 4 pm today we will have brought together more than 100 tonnes of different cargoes and this work continues. If necessary, we are ready to double that figure in the course of the day.


DIRECTOR OF THE FEDERAL MIGRATION SERVICE KONSTANTIN ROMODANOVSKY: We have been working in a situation that is constantly deteriorating. We are in control of the situation and we are helping citizens, despite the fact that many come to us with virtually no documents - documents have been lost, gone missing, or been burned. Nevertheless, the migration service is providing assistance in this regard.

We created infrastructure for migrants - there is a working group deployed in Vladikavkaz and in the centre as well. We are keeping track of the situation. Citizens are deployed in 10 so-called residence centres, namely schools and technical colleges. The majority are staying with relatives. The situation is under control and we continue to conduct our activities.


DMITRY MEDVEDEV: Are you ready for complications or any additional problems?

KONSTANTIN ROMODANOVSKY: We are ready.

DMITRY MEDVEDEV: Tatiana Alekseevna, what is happening with medication and other supplies?

HEALTH AND SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT MINISTER TATYANA GOLIKOVA: Dmitry Anatolyevich, in addition to the information that Sergei Kuzhugetovich [Shoigu] already reported, today literally by 12 o’clock a regular EMS plane, carrying 6 tonnes of cargo provided by our Russian Centre for Medical Disasters, Protection, will be dispatched: its cargo includes a hospital with 12 resuscitation places to be deployed and other supplies which have been calculated for about 10 days. The second plane will carry about another 15 tonnes of cargo: bandages, analgesics, suture materials and so on - everything that is needed, such as blankets. And the third plane will contain teams of doctors who will work on location. Furthermore, we have sent relevant professionals who can assist in organising medical care and providing social assistance, because it is not only the health Ministries of the republics of the Southern Federal District that are involved in this, there are also other bodies of social protection working on these issues.

Indeed, we now have organised them all, and all the regions of the Russian Federation who are nearby are working on this, and providing necessary places to relocate people. As a rule, we have placed refugees in social institutions, in schools, and in kindergartens - in short, we are doing everything possible to ensure that people in this situation feel comfortable, if I may put it that way.

DMITRY MEDVEDEV: Our challenge now consists in helping overcome the consequences of this humanitarian catastrophe, and naturally on all those fronts that you just mentioned. And those responsible for the humanitarian catastrophe in South Ossetia should be brought to justice, including before international law.

Source: http://kremlin.ru/eng/speeches/2008/...3_205067.shtml


YouTube - Russia mourns victims of Ossetian bloodshed

[crusader1492]

Re: Georgian-South Ossetian conflict

I can't believe some of the allegations in that RT video...the Georgian attackers acted acted more like barbaric Turkish muslims, rather than decendents of one of the first Christian nations.
For example, in the video the reporter stated that the Georgians targeted churches because they knew civilians would be hiding in there; a priest said 60% of his flock were killed.
You only need to replace the words South Ossetian for Armenian and Georgian for Turk and it sounds like events from the 1915 Genocide or events from the Artsakh war.

I hope the truth comes out so that the world knows exactly what happened in SO...those responsible must pay for these crimes. It's all in Russia's hands now.

[RSNATION]

Re: Georgian-South Ossetian conflict

Georgia 'still receives Israeli arms'

Thu, 14 Aug 2008 14:26:20 GMT

Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili says Tbilisi is still receiving military aid from Tel Aviv, rejecting Israeli media reports.

Citing Israeli military officials, the Jerusalem Post reported on August 10 that Israel had rejected frequent requests for arms from Georgia in the months leading up to the outbreak of the South Ossetia conflict.

"Several months ago, we carried out an evaluation of the situation in Georgia and realized that Georgia and Russia were on a collision course. We have good relations with both, and don't want to back either in this conflict," the unidentified officials were quoted by the daily as saying.

Saakashvili, however, denied the repot, saying “I haven't heard anything about that and I haven't had time to think about that issue for some days," he told the Israeli daily Haaretz.

The president added "the Israeli weapons have proved very effective".

Saakashvili's remarks come shortly after Reintegration Minister, Temur Yakobashvili's said that Israel joined the "West's betrayal" of Georgia, when it halted its military aid to the country.
Israeli news outlets had earlier reported that Saakashvili had commissioned from Israeli security firms up to 1,000 military advisers to train the country's armed forces.

The report also reveled that Tel Aviv provided Tbilisi with weapons as well as intelligence and electronic warfare systems.

http://www.presstv.com/detail.aspx?id=66591&sectionid=351020606

_________________

Thanks to Israeli training, we're fending off Russia - xxxish Georgian Minister Temur Yakobshvili

Source - http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1010187.html

Temur Yakobshvili

The Israelis are not stupid. The military aid will halt as Russia will always find out if it resumes, they have eyes and ears everywhere in the region. Saakashvili is all bluster and just trying to make it look to Russia as if Georgia still has Israeli support. He has been making the most outrageous statements. At some point, event the US will get sick of him and they will bring in a more moderate leader for Georgia.

[North Pole]

Re: Georgian-South Ossetian conflict

YouTube - Russia mourns victims of Ossetian bloodshed

RT VIDEO -- http://www.russiatoday.com/news/news/28945/video

Russia is holding a day of mourning for those killed during the five days of fighting in South Ossetia. People from the capital Tskhinvali, which became a battlefield after attack by Georgia, are recovering from a nightmare. It’s hard to find a citizen who hasn't lost a relative in the conflict. Meanwhile, Russian peacekeepers are continuing to pull people out from the rubble of destroyed buildings.

Funerals continue to take place in the breakaway republic for those killed during the war with Georgia.

Hundreds of people were hiding underground while the city was under attack, which almost completely destroyed the South Ossetian capital. Now the city is quiet. Most of its residents have fled or died.

The Chief Priest of the Province, Father Georgy, says 60% of his parishioners were killed.

“They particularly targeted churches because they knew that people tried to hide there,” he said.

It will take at least two years to rebuild Tskhinvali, according to the Russian Emergencies Ministry. Moscow is allocating $US 400 million to restore the region and $US 20 million for an emergency search operation.

READ MORE -- http://www.russiatoday.com/news/news/28945

[RSNATION]

Re: Georgian-South Ossetian conflict

A pretty important article from the Moscow Times on this war and the future of warfare, especially in the former USSR. Armenia needs to learn from these. The writer is Armenian btw.
----------------------------------------------
Conflict Exposes Obsolete Hardware
15 August 2008 By Simon Saradzhyan / Staff Writer

The brief but intensive armed conflict in South Ossetia has signaled Russia's willingness and ability to fight and win conflicts beyond its borders after years of focusing its war machine on nuclear deterrence and the suppression of internal security threats.

But while the conflict has demonstrated that Russia can and will coerce its post-Soviet neighbors with force if the West doesn't intervene, it has exposed the technical backwardness of its military.

The technical sophistication of the Russian forces turned out to be inferior in comparison with the Georgian military. While Georgia's armed forces operated Soviet-era T-72 tanks and Su-25 attack planes, both were upgraded with equipment such as night-vision systems to make them technologically superior to similar models operated by the Russian Ground Forces, said Konstantin Makiyenko, deputy director of the Center for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies.

"The Russian forces had to operate in an environment of technical inferiority," Makiyenko said.

Another area where the Russian military appeared to have lagged behind the Georgian armed forces was in electronic warfare, said Anatoly Tsyganok, a retired army commando and independent military expert.

The Georgian forces were also well-trained, with many of them drilled by U.S. and Israeli advisers.

These factors helped the Georgian military easily take the South Ossetian capital, Tskhinvali, located in a basin, after more than 10 hours of intensive air strikes and artillery fire on Aug. 7. The shelling of the city was probably carried out with the use of unmanned aerial vehicles for targeting -- a capability that Russia's armed forces have yet to acquire.

The attack came as a surprise to Russian peacekeepers stationed in South Ossetia, and the conflict represents a major intelligence failure, former Defense Minister Pavel Grachev said in an interview published in Nezavisimaya Gazeta this week.

But Stratfor, a private U.S.-based intelligence agency, said Russian commanders were aware of a strong possibility that Georgian forces might attack and had amassed equipment close to the Russian-Georgian border but refrained from crossing over so as not to jump the gun. "Given the posture of Russian troops, how could intelligence analysts have missed the possibility that the Russians had laid a trap, hoping for a Georgian invasion to justify its own counterattack?" Stratfor said in an analysis.

Whether or not the attack came as a surprise, the Georgian side timed it well, with Prime Minister Vladimir Putin in Beijing for the Olympics and both President Dmitry Medvedev and the commander of the 58th Army, which is closest to South Ossetia, on vacation, Tsyganok said.

Only 2,500 Ossetian fighters and less than 600 Russian peacekeepers were on hand to counter 7,500 Georgian troops backed by dozens of tanks and armored personnel carriers, according to estimates by Russian generals and experts. Tbilisi's plan appears to have been to conquer Tskhinvali in 24 hours and then advance to South Ossetia's border with Russia in the next 24 hours to present Russia with a fait accompli.

The blitzkrieg plan, however, faltered despite the personnel and technical superiority of Georgian troops, highlighting errors in the Georgians' political and military planning.

The Georgians failed to fully conquer Tskhinvali and started to retreat on Aug. 8, when army units arrived from Russia. The Russians eventually forced the Georgian units into full retreat by bombing military facilities across Georgia to disrupt supplies and reinforcements.

The Kremlin timed its response perfectly, because sending troops earlier would have drawn immediate accusations of a disproportionate response, while stalling further could have allowed the Georgian troops to seize Tskhinvali and the rest of South Ossetia, Makiyenko said. The Russian troops established control over much of South Ossetia by Aug. 10 and then started to make inroads into Georgia proper, destroying military facilities. As the Russian and South Ossetian units advanced, forces from another separatist province, Abkhazia, moved to push Georgian units out of the upper Kodor Gorge. They succeeded in doing so shortly after Russia deployed an additional 9,000 paratroopers and 350 armored vehicles to Abkhazia under the pretext of deterring a Georgian attack on Russian peacekeepers there.

The Georgian attack failed because President Mikheil Saakashvili and the rest of Georgia's leadership miscalculated the speed of Russia's intervention, defense analysts said. Tbilisi also underestimated the South Ossetian paramilitary's determination to resist the conquest and overestimated the Georgian forces' resolve to fight in the face of fierce resistance. The Georgian military also failed to take advantage of the fact that Russian reinforcements had to arrive via the Roksky Tunnel and mountain passes, which are easier to block than roads on flat terrain.

Another reason the Georgians lost was because the Russian military used knowledge gleaned from past conflicts, including the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia and its own reconquest of Chechnya. "Russia has learned the lessons taught by NATO in Yugoslavia, immediately initiating a bombing campaign against Georgia's air bases and other military facilities," Tsyganok said.

Having learned from the Chechen conflict, Russian commanders minimized the presence of inexperienced and poorly trained troops in the advancing units, he said.

Anatoly Nogovitsyn, deputy head of the armed forces' General Staff, denied media reports that conscripts served in these units, but in any case it was professional soldiers who bore the brunt of the assault. Among them were elite airborne commando and army units such as the Vostok battalion, manned by ethnic Chechens and subordinated to the Main Intelligence Directorate. The battalion did not lose a single soldier in the fighting and earned high praise from generals for the operation in South Ossetia, Kommersant reported Wednesday.

The extent of the causalities and loss of equipment by South Ossetian and Georgian forces remained unclear Thursday. As of Wednesday evening, Russia lost 70 servicemen in combat, while another 171 were wounded, including the commander of the 58th Army, Lieutenant General Anatoly Khrulev, who led the counteroffensive, Nogovitsyn said.

The fact that Russian warplanes failed to prevent the shelling of Khrulev's convoy attests to the insufficiency of the Russian Air Force in the conflict.

Khrulev's vulnerability, however, might have come as a result of his own incompetence, as he chose to travel in a convoy that lacked sufficient combat support and was accompanied by journalists who used telephones that could have been intercepted by Georgian electronic warfare specialists, said Yury Netkachev, a retired lieutenant general and former deputy commander of the Russian troops in the South Caucasus.

Nogovitsyn said the Georgians shot down four Russian warplanes. The Georgians said that Russia had lost 19 planes as of Monday.

The Air Force's losses, including a long-range Tu-22, and helplessness in the face of air strikes by Georgian Su-25 attack planes and artillery fire on Tskhinvali as late as Monday should set off alarm bells in Russia, Makiyenko said. "The failure to quickly suppress the Georgian air defense despite rather rudimentary capabilities or to achieve air supremacy despite a lack of fighter planes in the Georgian air force shows the poor condition of the Russian Air Force," he said.

The loss of Russian planes might have come because of the poor training of pilots, who log only a fraction of the hundreds of flight hours that their NATO counterparts do annually, Netkachev wrote in Nezavisimaya Gazeta on Monday.

Russian intelligence bears responsibility too for failing to provide up-to-date information on the capabilities of the Georgian air defense and air force, Netkachev said. As recently as three years ago, Georgia had no pilots capable of flying the Israeli-upgraded Su-25 planes, he said, adding that Russian commanders should have known that Ukraine had supplied Buk and Osa air-defense systems to Georgia and might have trained its operators.

"One general lesson that the Russian side should learn is that it is possible to build a capable, well-trained force in just three to four years, as Saakashvili did," Makiyenko said.

The military brass has admitted the poor performance of some systems and the inferiority of others and will draw "serious conclusions," Nogovitsyn said Wednesday. "We have incurred serious losses, including in the Air Force, and have taken into account what's happened and will continue to do so," he said.

He hinted that the military command was not satisfied with the way the Air Force had targeted sites beyond the front lines but said some of the blame lies in the fact that the Georgians' air-defense systems were mobile. He attributed the inefficiency of aerial reconnaissance to smoke from burning buildings in Tskhinvali. He also singled out the backwardness of Russia's electronic warfare systems, acknowledging that they dated back to Soviet times.

The armed forces lack round-the-clock all-weather high-precision weaponry systems, as well as modern electronic warfare systems, defense analysts have said for years. The lack of such systems was highlighted by the two wars that federal forces fought in Chechnya. A draft strategy for the development of the armed forces through 2030, leaked to the press earlier this summer, says the modern and advanced weapons systems used by Western armed forces are one of the main threats facing Russia.

Only 20 percent of conventional weaponry operated by the armed forces can be described as modern, according to Nezavisimoye Voyennoye Oxxxreniye, an independent military weekly. Yet the government and military have disproportionately skewed financing toward the strategic nuclear forces, which they see as the main deterrent, at the expense of conventional forces.

The lack of modern, quality equipment became evident when several tanks and armored personnel carriers broke down as army reinforcements moved from Russia to South Ossetia, Makiyenko said. Overall, however, the Ground Forces operated better than the Air Force, accomplishing their mission of routing the Georgian units, he said.

"The main lesson that Russia should draw from this conflict is that we need to urgently upgrade our Air Force, with a comprehensive general reform to follow," he said.

So far, however, there is no sign that the Russian leadership wants to put more thought into preparing for future conflicts. While detailing the Western threat, the draft 2008-2030 military strategy only vaguely refers to local and regional threats.

From http://www.themoscowtimes.com/articl.../42/369809.htm

Excellent article with invaluable analysis. It should be noted that the South Africans can provide very good upgrades for Russian tanks, jets, etc. Armenia should keep this in mind.

[Federate]

Re: Georgian-South Ossetian conflict

A pretty important article from the Moscow Times on this war and the future of warfare, especially in the former USSR. Armenia needs to learn from these. The writer is Armenian btw.
----------------------------------------------
Conflict Exposes Obsolete Hardware
15 August 2008 By Simon Saradzhyan / Staff Writer

The brief but intensive armed conflict in South Ossetia has signaled Russia's willingness and ability to fight and win conflicts beyond its borders after years of focusing its war machine on nuclear deterrence and the suppression of internal security threats.

But while the conflict has demonstrated that Russia can and will coerce its post-Soviet neighbors with force if the West doesn't intervene, it has exposed the technical backwardness of its military.

The technical sophistication of the Russian forces turned out to be inferior in comparison with the Georgian military. While Georgia's armed forces operated Soviet-era T-72 tanks and Su-25 attack planes, both were upgraded with equipment such as night-vision systems to make them technologically superior to similar models operated by the Russian Ground Forces, said Konstantin Makiyenko, deputy director of the Center for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies.

"The Russian forces had to operate in an environment of technical inferiority," Makiyenko said.

Another area where the Russian military appeared to have lagged behind the Georgian armed forces was in electronic warfare, said Anatoly Tsyganok, a retired army commando and independent military expert.

The Georgian forces were also well-trained, with many of them drilled by U.S. and Israeli advisers.

These factors helped the Georgian military easily take the South Ossetian capital, Tskhinvali, located in a basin, after more than 10 hours of intensive air strikes and artillery fire on Aug. 7. The shelling of the city was probably carried out with the use of unmanned aerial vehicles for targeting -- a capability that Russia's armed forces have yet to acquire.

The attack came as a surprise to Russian peacekeepers stationed in South Ossetia, and the conflict represents a major intelligence failure, former Defense Minister Pavel Grachev said in an interview published in Nezavisimaya Gazeta this week.

But Stratfor, a private U.S.-based intelligence agency, said Russian commanders were aware of a strong possibility that Georgian forces might attack and had amassed equipment close to the Russian-Georgian border but refrained from crossing over so as not to jump the gun. "Given the posture of Russian troops, how could intelligence analysts have missed the possibility that the Russians had laid a trap, hoping for a Georgian invasion to justify its own counterattack?" Stratfor said in an analysis.

Whether or not the attack came as a surprise, the Georgian side timed it well, with Prime Minister Vladimir Putin in Beijing for the Olympics and both President Dmitry Medvedev and the commander of the 58th Army, which is closest to South Ossetia, on vacation, Tsyganok said.

Only 2,500 Ossetian fighters and less than 600 Russian peacekeepers were on hand to counter 7,500 Georgian troops backed by dozens of tanks and armored personnel carriers, according to estimates by Russian generals and experts. Tbilisi's plan appears to have been to conquer Tskhinvali in 24 hours and then advance to South Ossetia's border with Russia in the next 24 hours to present Russia with a fait accompli.

The blitzkrieg plan, however, faltered despite the personnel and technical superiority of Georgian troops, highlighting errors in the Georgians' political and military planning.

The Georgians failed to fully conquer Tskhinvali and started to retreat on Aug. 8, when army units arrived from Russia. The Russians eventually forced the Georgian units into full retreat by bombing military facilities across Georgia to disrupt supplies and reinforcements.

The Kremlin timed its response perfectly, because sending troops earlier would have drawn immediate accusations of a disproportionate response, while stalling further could have allowed the Georgian troops to seize Tskhinvali and the rest of South Ossetia, Makiyenko said. The Russian troops established control over much of South Ossetia by Aug. 10 and then started to make inroads into Georgia proper, destroying military facilities. As the Russian and South Ossetian units advanced, forces from another separatist province, Abkhazia, moved to push Georgian units out of the upper Kodor Gorge. They succeeded in doing so shortly after Russia deployed an additional 9,000 paratroopers and 350 armored vehicles to Abkhazia under the pretext of deterring a Georgian attack on Russian peacekeepers there.

The Georgian attack failed because President Mikheil Saakashvili and the rest of Georgia's leadership miscalculated the speed of Russia's intervention, defense analysts said. Tbilisi also underestimated the South Ossetian paramilitary's determination to resist the conquest and overestimated the Georgian forces' resolve to fight in the face of fierce resistance. The Georgian military also failed to take advantage of the fact that Russian reinforcements had to arrive via the Roksky Tunnel and mountain passes, which are easier to block than roads on flat terrain.

Another reason the Georgians lost was because the Russian military used knowledge gleaned from past conflicts, including the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia and its own reconquest of Chechnya. "Russia has learned the lessons taught by NATO in Yugoslavia, immediately initiating a bombing campaign against Georgia's air bases and other military facilities," Tsyganok said.

Having learned from the Chechen conflict, Russian commanders minimized the presence of inexperienced and poorly trained troops in the advancing units, he said.

Anatoly Nogovitsyn, deputy head of the armed forces' General Staff, denied media reports that conscripts served in these units, but in any case it was professional soldiers who bore the brunt of the assault. Among them were elite airborne commando and army units such as the Vostok battalion, manned by ethnic Chechens and subordinated to the Main Intelligence Directorate. The battalion did not lose a single soldier in the fighting and earned high praise from generals for the operation in South Ossetia, Kommersant reported Wednesday.

The extent of the causalities and loss of equipment by South Ossetian and Georgian forces remained unclear Thursday. As of Wednesday evening, Russia lost 70 servicemen in combat, while another 171 were wounded, including the commander of the 58th Army, Lieutenant General Anatoly Khrulev, who led the counteroffensive, Nogovitsyn said.

The fact that Russian warplanes failed to prevent the shelling of Khrulev's convoy attests to the insufficiency of the Russian Air Force in the conflict.

Khrulev's vulnerability, however, might have come as a result of his own incompetence, as he chose to travel in a convoy that lacked sufficient combat support and was accompanied by journalists who used telephones that could have been intercepted by Georgian electronic warfare specialists, said Yury Netkachev, a retired lieutenant general and former deputy commander of the Russian troops in the South Caucasus.

Nogovitsyn said the Georgians shot down four Russian warplanes. The Georgians said that Russia had lost 19 planes as of Monday.

The Air Force's losses, including a long-range Tu-22, and helplessness in the face of air strikes by Georgian Su-25 attack planes and artillery fire on Tskhinvali as late as Monday should set off alarm bells in Russia, Makiyenko said. "The failure to quickly suppress the Georgian air defense despite rather rudimentary capabilities or to achieve air supremacy despite a lack of fighter planes in the Georgian air force shows the poor condition of the Russian Air Force," he said.

The loss of Russian planes might have come because of the poor training of pilots, who log only a fraction of the hundreds of flight hours that their NATO counterparts do annually, Netkachev wrote in Nezavisimaya Gazeta on Monday.

Russian intelligence bears responsibility too for failing to provide up-to-date information on the capabilities of the Georgian air defense and air force, Netkachev said. As recently as three years ago, Georgia had no pilots capable of flying the Israeli-upgraded Su-25 planes, he said, adding that Russian commanders should have known that Ukraine had supplied Buk and Osa air-defense systems to Georgia and might have trained its operators.

"One general lesson that the Russian side should learn is that it is possible to build a capable, well-trained force in just three to four years, as Saakashvili did," Makiyenko said.

The military brass has admitted the poor performance of some systems and the inferiority of others and will draw "serious conclusions," Nogovitsyn said Wednesday. "We have incurred serious losses, including in the Air Force, and have taken into account what's happened and will continue to do so," he said.

He hinted that the military command was not satisfied with the way the Air Force had targeted sites beyond the front lines but said some of the blame lies in the fact that the Georgians' air-defense systems were mobile. He attributed the inefficiency of aerial reconnaissance to smoke from burning buildings in Tskhinvali. He also singled out the backwardness of Russia's electronic warfare systems, acknowledging that they dated back to Soviet times.

The armed forces lack round-the-clock all-weather high-precision weaponry systems, as well as modern electronic warfare systems, defense analysts have said for years. The lack of such systems was highlighted by the two wars that federal forces fought in Chechnya. A draft strategy for the development of the armed forces through 2030, leaked to the press earlier this summer, says the modern and advanced weapons systems used by Western armed forces are one of the main threats facing Russia.

Only 20 percent of conventional weaponry operated by the armed forces can be described as modern, according to Nezavisimoye Voyennoye Oxxxreniye, an independent military weekly. Yet the government and military have disproportionately skewed financing toward the strategic nuclear forces, which they see as the main deterrent, at the expense of conventional forces.

The lack of modern, quality equipment became evident when several tanks and armored personnel carriers broke down as army reinforcements moved from Russia to South Ossetia, Makiyenko said. Overall, however, the Ground Forces operated better than the Air Force, accomplishing their mission of routing the Georgian units, he said.

"The main lesson that Russia should draw from this conflict is that we need to urgently upgrade our Air Force, with a comprehensive general reform to follow," he said.

So far, however, there is no sign that the Russian leadership wants to put more thought into preparing for future conflicts. While detailing the Western threat, the draft 2008-2030 military strategy only vaguely refers to local and regional threats.

From http://www.themoscowtimes.com/articl.../42/369809.htm

[North Pole]

Re: Georgian-South Ossetian conflict

Georgia 'still receives Israeli arms'

Thu, 14 Aug 2008 14:26:20 GMT

Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili says Tbilisi is still receiving military aid from Tel Aviv, rejecting Israeli media reports.

Citing Israeli military officials, the Jerusalem Post reported on August 10 that Israel had rejected frequent requests for arms from Georgia in the months leading up to the outbreak of the South Ossetia conflict.

"Several months ago, we carried out an evaluation of the situation in Georgia and realized that Georgia and Russia were on a collision course. We have good relations with both, and don't want to back either in this conflict," the unidentified officials were quoted by the daily as saying.

Saakashvili, however, denied the repot, saying “I haven't heard anything about that and I haven't had time to think about that issue for some days," he told the Israeli daily Haaretz.

The president added "the Israeli weapons have proved very effective".

Saakashvili's remarks come shortly after Reintegration Minister, Temur Yakobashvili's said that Israel joined the "West's betrayal" of Georgia, when it halted its military aid to the country.
Israeli news outlets had earlier reported that Saakashvili had commissioned from Israeli security firms up to 1,000 military advisers to train the country's armed forces.

The report also reveled that Tel Aviv provided Tbilisi with weapons as well as intelligence and electronic warfare systems.

http://www.presstv.com/detail.aspx?id=66591&sectionid=351020606

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Thanks to Israeli training, we're fending off Russia - xxxish Georgian Minister Temur Yakobshvili

Source - http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1010187.html

Temur Yakobshvili

[crusader1492]

Re: Georgian-South Ossetian conflict

I agree. That moron is needs to be put in an asylum. Can you provide the article's source? Thanks

Here you go:

http://structuraleconissues.blogspot.com/2008/08/russias-plan-for-reestablishing-empire.html