Georgian-South Ossetian conflict

[North Pole]

Re: Georgian-South Ossetian conflict

It is official now - America was involved.


Meeting with the President of South Ossetia Eduard Kokoity and President of Abkhazia Sergei Bagapsh

August 14, 2008
The Kremlin, Moscow


PRESIDENT OF RUSSIA DMITRY MEDVEDEV: Dear colleagues!

A tragedy has claimed the lives of many people from the civilian population of South Ossetia and the Russian peacekeeping forces. I would like, dear colleagues, for you to first and foremost express our sincere condolences to all those who suffered and who have been affected by this barbaric aggression.

You defended your land and justice was on your side. That is why you won, with the assistance of Russian peacekeepers, a reinforced peacekeeping contingent. I think that this is an appropriate outcome. Today, we need to restore peace and not to let your grief result in hostility, and at the same time to construct a solid barrier to prevent possible future aggression.

You know that recently the President of France and I agreed on certain principles governing a settlement.

They have been declared and publicly endorsed by Georgia, though with certain adjustments to paragraph six concerning the beginning of an international debate on ensuring the lasting security of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. But the principles themselves, important as they are, are not everything. We need to prepare a completely final, binding treaty abjuring the use of force, which must be signed by the parties to the conflict and guaranteed by Russia, the EU, the OSCE, and perhaps some other actors.

Nevertheless, these principles are a foundation that we can work on. I hope that we will discuss this issue. And as President of the Russian Federation I expect a constructive approach from our other partners, as they are the ones that can supply weapons to Georgia. But to give weapons does not mean to restore peace. We must help peace and not war.

And finally, what I wanted to say, last but not least. You know about the sixth principle - I just mentioned this - the issue of status. I would like you to know and to convey to the people of South Ossetia and Abkhazia that the position of the Russian Federation will not change: we will support any decision taken by the peoples of South Ossetia and Abkhazia in accordance with the United Nations Charter, international conventions of 1966, and the Helsinki Act on security and cooperation in Europe. And we not only support these decisions but will guarantee them in the Caucasus and in the world.



PRESIDENT OF SOUTH OSSETIA EDUARD KOKOITY: Dear Dmitry Anatolyevich!

On behalf of the people of the Republic of South Ossetia I would like to express our deep gratitude to you and to Russia for its timely action to prevent the total destruction of the Ossetian people in South Ossetia. Russia’s actions were timely and very necessary.

We have long warned of many of our colleagues about the aggression being prepared against South Ossetia and Abkhazia, but we were not met with understanding in the OSCE nor the European Union. And just what happened to our people - to the people of South Ossetia - shows that Georgia did not act alone. And today many European countries, primarily, of course, the United States, are also responsible for the genocide of the small Ossetian people. Even the code name for the operation which took place in South Ossetia - Clean Slate - speaks for itself.

And despite all that our people endured, we support the efforts of the Russian Federation, we understand our responsibility to all the peoples of the Caucasus, and we are ready to sign this document in order to once again show the world that neither South Ossetia nor Abkhazia, nor the peoples of the Caucasus want war.



PRESIDENT OF ABKHAZIA SERGEI BAGAPSH: Dmitry Anatolyevich!

I would like to join Eduard Dzhabeevich, my friend and brother, and say a huge thank you to you, to the leadership of the Russian Federation, for first and foremost ensuring that Russia has become what it is today.

As for us, we have chosen our path in life and will continue along it forever. And what the Russian Federation has done represents a gesture which our peoples, and not only ours, will appreciate. The nobility of the state and determination of its leaders has, of course, been-demonstrated at the very highest level. It saved our people in South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

We know the work you did while meeting with the President of France. We know about these principles and the changes that were introduced. And, of course, subject to safeguards from the Russian Federation and all that you said, we will sign the document and support all the initiatives that the Russian Federation makes.

DMITRY MEDVEDEV: Thank you. Then perhaps we should do this right now so that all parties know about it.


Source: http://kremlin.ru/eng/speeches/2008/...4_205321.shtml

[RSNATION]

Re: Georgian-South Ossetian conflict

Nice try...some neocon advises Armenia to distance itself from Russia



Someone should tell this esh that there is no need for Russia to "invade" Armenia. Armenia is a willing participate in Russian hegemony for obvious reasons.

It seems these neocons are trying to impose a new cold war through lying and instilling fear. I suppose this is their plan in order to perpetuate their power/influence.

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

[RSNATION]

Re: Georgian-South Ossetian conflict

Georgian forces firing on journalists because they feel humiliated

http://www.breitbart.tv/html/151953.html

[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

[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

_________________

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

[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

[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.

[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

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.

[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.