By the sounds of artillery, tanks, and strategic bombers on August 8, world attention was suddenly wrenched away from the brightly elaborate Olympic spectacle in China to the obscure mountain valleys of Georgia. Yet despite the considerable resources immediately brought to bear by governments and media organizations alike on trying to figure out what became revealed by the scale of those explosions to be the largest interstate conflict to reach Europe since World War II, the basic facts of the conflict — to say nothing about questions of extent, fault, or potential consequences — have remained masked by what has been described as a “cloud of war” hanging over the Caucasus.
Of course, in our globalized age of information, there was never any possibility of an information blackout — on the contrary, seemingly credible news reports came out of Georgia on an hourly basis claiming that, for example, Tbilisi International Airport has been bombed, or that Georgian troops in the breakaway South Ossetian republic's “capital” of South Ossetia have ignored several ceasefires announced by their president. Yet the chaos of the war is obscuring the nature of the conflict not due to a lack of reporting, but paradoxically to an overabundance of it — for on every key diplomatic or military move, news reports have been directly and mutually contradictory. From Georgian sources and reporters based in Georgian-controlled territory, the story of a relentlessly vicious Russian attack against an isolated government emerged, only to be matched by a story emerging on the other side of the front line of a steady campaign against a barbaric, genocidal regime hoping to quietly get away with ethnic cleansing during the world's sporting holiday. Without any real experience with the region with which to evaluate two claims that together simply cannot be true, most well-intentioned states had no ability to act — they simply issued statements urging an end to the violence, and hoped that peace would return so that a clearer factual picture could emerge.
As dedicated analysts of the southern corners of the former Soviet Union and its turbulent international relations, we reacted to the first shots of the Russo-Georgian War on that day not with bewilderment or surprise, but with frustration. Frustration because our own experiences — borne not just of research or of analysis but of having personally lived through tribulations of the Rose and Orange revolutions (respectively) and the many hopeful and pessimistic moments in between — have given us the experience to discern that this was no accidental escalation for which two sides bear equal responsibility.
But who are we, as non-governmental outsiders, to make such an immediate judgment? It's simple: because we were watching Georgia
before the fog of war descended on the Caucasus. And for the last three years, president — now technically prime minister — Putin and the Russian government have telegraphed amply their intentions not just for Georgia, but for the whole “lost” region of the Near Abroad. We knew that no statements of hope for peace would end this conflict.
On our first point of frustration, the fact that this was seen as a conflict over a particular region rather than a full-scale war between states, the evens since April 10 have proved to be somewhat revealing, as no observer with pretenses of neutrality can understand the bombings of civilian targets and of economic and transport infrastructure located in places with no relation whatsoever to South Ossetia. While Russia and its sources still claim that “no bombs have been dropped” on non-military targets, and that its moves to quadruple its presence along a second front in Abkhazia are “purely to ensure the safety of South Ossetia,” the fact that Western camera crews have recorded these attacks in detail — and that Russia's own foreign minister has baldly admitted its desire to get rid of the “obstructive” Georgian government — has made this hard to sustain.
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