We were not ready – our fear had become chronic and we were not ready for what happened. We were very tense, – the former Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili said in an interview with the Institute for War and Peace Reporting (IWPR).
In an interview the former president speaks about he 2008 Georgia-Russia war, criticizing Tagliavni Commission report and opposing the part of the report saying that Russian troops were already in the conflict zone, though Georgia had begun the conflict.
Saakashvili noted that it would be difficult for Georgia not to resist because people died and were persecuted there.
“later, at a certain moment we started to tell ourselves it might be okay now, because in spring we were very close to war, then there was lots of mediation and then at certain moment, we let ourselves think it was ok… you know, it’s a small country, people have to go for holidays, officers have to go for holidays, government has to rest somewhere. I myself was very close to taking over Tbilisi Airport that night, August 7. I went to the airport twice and I came back twice; I was leaving for China. We were going to Beijing for the Olympics; the tension has become so chronic that there was shooting, subsiding, shooting, again subsiding and then we said ok, that’s as normal, nothing new there, I’d better go to Beijing and see the leaders. I’d better go and complain.
Because in the evening they started shooting en masse, that’s why I stayed. The plan before that was to put them on standby before trying to take anything back and for me to go to Beijing and say, look we have the situation – to Bush or somebody – we have this situation, please interfere. I tried to call everyone and nobody would pick up; only Jaap De Hoopscheffer, then NATO secretary general spoke to me on an open line and I couldn’t say much on an open line. I just described the general situation. I tried to call Frank-Walter Steinmeier, then German minister of foreign affairs; he was on holiday. I tried to call someone in Washington and nobody was there. [Senior official] Michael Carpenter was the only one who was on duty in the state department; then I managed to speak with Carl Bildt, the Swedish minister of foreign affairs and that was it. We weren’t really sure of anything”, – Former President said.
When Journalists asked about accusations voiced against him on Tskhinvali bombing, Saakashvili responded to it:
“When you launch a military operation, it’s a military protocol, you don’t make decisions on the political field. When you are fighting an uphill battle, it’s the military that calls the shots. Certainly, they had been instructed to uphold humanitarian values. The Human Rights Watch report clearly says that when Georgians entered some Ossetian villages, they said, ‘Don’t worry, Misha [Saakashvili] told us not touch you.’ But that was the attitude, they knew that they had to uphold norms but otherwise it was up to them what firepower to use against targets, you cannot control it politically. The problem was we couldn’t get to those valleys which were under attack any more – the road was blocked, so the solution was to clear a way to that road and you know, either if you go through mountains for that, you are an inviting target, they can shoot you and especially GRU troops [Russian special forces] were on the main hill and they could target that road easily. The thing was these proverbial ‘green people’ were already there and GRU troops sitting firmly on the mountain, seizing strategically important positions” – He said.
Saakashvili explained that it was clear response to all Russia’s major offences. “They attacked our troops, they attacked our villages with all the firepower that they could use against a peaceful population. What we did was an adequate response to their major offensive. Russian troops were attacking from several directions with massed firepower, GRU troops were coordinating with the so-called South Ossetia troops – it was already an offensive. The only way we could stop it, considering we didn’t have much presence on the ground, was artillery. At least that’s what the military decided”, – he said.
To the question “what was the expected result” Saakashvili answered: “To move fast through the city and valleys and to get to the area where we could lock the road and block their further advancement. The Roki tunnel was already teeming with Russian tanks, so we had to go, we had to pass through Tskhinvali, but we were late, the Russians had already started what turned out to be an invasion. They were already for sure in the tunnel, they were in village of Java; they were waiting for things to happen here. So if you want to talk about our mistakes, our mistake was to act too late and do too little. In the end we did whatever we could, but we were stalled and we had just some pieces of the bigger picture, at that time all we had to act upon was merely pieces of information”, – Saakashvili added.
According to Saakashvili the government made a mistake when thinking that Putin would never go to Tbilisi. ‘ And that’s where I miscalculated over Putin because our thinking was that they would never go for Tbilisi, and we were also convinced by our Western friends about that.
“Western friends said that the Russians would never invade us; Condi Rice always said that; she said I know the Russians, I went, I skated in Russia as a young girl, I went to Moscow, MGIMO [the Moscow State Institute of International Relations], I know them, they will provoke you but they will never do anything. That was their assessment; the only guy who said otherwise was Steinmeier; Steinmeier put this to us very bluntly, now that I think of that. It was an assessment of German intelligence based on their internal sources in Moscow because Steinmeier came to Georgia in a very hasty way and he was nervous, you could see that, he just came because he thought an invasion would happen and he wanted to show that beforehand at least they tried to do something and he told us, in the German way, that there will be an invasion” – Saakashvili said.
