Word: saakashvili
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...astounded that Brzezinski piled all the blame for the Russia-Georgia conflict on Russia. He should have pointed out that for decades, Ossetians and Abkhazians were discriminated against by the Georgians. When the U.S.S.R. was beginning to collapse, Georgian nationalists began to blockade Ossetian and Abkhazian towns. Mikheil Saakashvili, Georgia's democratic leader (as Brzezinski calls him) - whose police officers were using force on nonviolent protesters just last November - was goaded by the U.S. and NATO into waking up the Russian bear. It looks as if Georgia will now pay the price. Armen Hovhanesyan, Westwood, Calif...
...province of South Ossetia on Aug. 8. On the night of Aug. 12, a day when Russian planes dropped cluster bombs on the town of Gori, the Presidents of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and Ukraine took the stage in front of the Georgian parliament building beside Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili. "Everyone who believes in democracy says today, 'I am Georgian!' " said Estonian President Toomas Hendrik Ilves. His Polish counterpart, Lech Kaczynski, railed against Russia: "Today Georgia, tomorrow Ukraine, the next day perhaps my country...
...Statements from President George W. Bush and others may have emboldened Saakashvili to expect U.S. assistance that in the end wasn't forthcoming, but that's a far cry from an active role in launching military action. The truth is that both Russia and Georgia had plenty of reasons of their own to start a war. Putin, who resents Saakashvili for his brazen defiance of Moscow and close ties to the West, had ample grounds to try to invade Georgia and oust him. Saakashvili, for his part, had staked his presidency on "reintegrating" Georgia's two breakaway territories into Georgia...
...Georgia's claim that Russia started the war is not completely convincing either. In an interview with TIME, Saakashvili said he ordered his troops to attack the South Ossetian city of Tskhinvali only after Russia launched its invasion into Georgian territory; his professed aim was to slow Russia's advance by 48 hours in order to give the international community time to act. But on the night of Aug. 7, and for three to four days afterward, Georgian officials did not say that Russia had launched its invasion first but only that their forces were responding to stepped-up attacks...
...There may be a kernel of truth to both sides. Saakashvili may have thought that his forces could stamp out the South Ossetian defense force in one swift strike without provoking a Russian response; indeed, a mistaken belief that Western allies could intervene diplomatically to restrain Russia might have encouraged him in that calculation. For its part, Russia could well have sought to provoke Georgia into such a response (by urging the South Ossetians to step up attacks on Georgian positions) in order to provide them with a pretext to invade...