Word: russian
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...situation has been made worse by a second wave of violence after the Russian intervention, carried out not by soldiers but by looters, including some local Ossetian militias as well as Chechen and Cossack gangs from Russia. It has laid further waste to the region, say refugees and human rights workers. "This conflict has been a disaster for civilians," Rachel Denber, Europe and Central Asia deputy director at Human Rights Watch, said in a statement on Monday. She said there was an urgent need for fact-finding missions to establish the facts of the conflict and to "urge authorities...
...looting is justified as retribution for the Georgian attacks on Ossetian positions that provoked Russia's military intervention. The breakaway territory's nominal president, Eduard Kokoity, a former wrestler, when asked whether ethnic Georgians who had been living in South Ossetia would be allowed to return, told the Russian daily Kommersant that "we have no intention of letting them in there...
...Several Russian officials, confronted by aid officials with evidence of widespread looting in the occupied Georgian city of Gori, said the area is not their responsibility because it is legally Georgian territory. But human rights monitors reject that argument. "This area [now occupied by Russian troops] is effectively under Russian control. The Georgian military is not there, so Russia has a responsibility to protect civilians there," says Giorgi Gogia, a researcher for Human Rights Watch in Georgia. In Tskhinvali, however, locals say the Russian presence has helped re-establish security. "When the Russian army came," says Misha Masurashvili, a gangly...
...troops and militia had begun ethnic cleansing when they tried to retake the breakaway region, and South Ossetian Interior Minister Mikhail Minzayev has estimated 2,100 dead. (Western journalists in the area have come up with rough estimates of 500 to 600 dead.) Gogia said the South Ossetian and Russian claims of more than 1,000 dead are "inflated, exaggerated. There is no way to say a genocide take place. If there were 2,000 dead, we would have 6,000 wounded, and we have seen nothing like that." Meanwhile, Minzayev denied there had been acts of ethnic cleansing against...
...Even as Russian tanks began their desultory withdrawal from Georgia on Tuesday, dozens of houses were still burning in Georgian villages north of Tskhinvali, the capital of the Georgian breakaway republic of South Ossetia. Many Ossetians appear keen to assure that the displacement of ethnic Georgians from the region becomes permanent...