Word: saakashvili
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...stay calm." But the military is rebuilding. An infantry battalion will deploy to Afghanistan in January under the command of U.S. Marines, and it will return, as veterans did from a deployment in Iraq, with more experience and confidence for the next engagement. Though the E.U. report found that Saakashvili was unjustified in firing first, he says the Russians left him without options. "I've been running it over and over again, what happened," he said. "But we had no choice." (See pictures of the war in Georgia...
...Saakashvili's earliest political promises in 2004 was to get Abkhazia and South Ossetia back in Georgia's fold. Both territories had turned to Russia for protection after a bloody civil war in the early 1990s, however, and the Kremlin had little incentive to broker a peace. Instead, it began to use unrest there to undermine Saakashvili's courtship of NATO, which he wanted Georgia to join. Saakashvili told me that from the outset, any talk he had with then Russian President Vladimir Putin on the breakaway territories was met with warnings about his relationship to the West: "The first...
Read an interview with Saakashvili...
After years of escalating border incidents, war began in earnest the night of Aug. 7, 2008, when Saakashvili, who says he believed a Russian attack was imminent, ordered the shelling of Tskhinvali, the capital of South Ossetia. It was a colossal miscalculation. Saakashvili told me he never expected the U.S., Georgia's closest ally, to fight for Georgia. Yet the country was nonetheless gripped by a sense of abandonment when the inevitable punishing Russian counterattack came. The Russians bombed infrastructure targets all over Georgia and cut off the main east-west highway, then marched to within 34 miles...
...rapprochement between warring parties seems unlikely. In a brief telephone interview, South Ossetian leader Eduard Kokoity called Saakashvili "psychologically unbalanced," "unstable" and a "liar." For his part, Saakashvili seems to like to taunt Putin, now Prime Minister of Russia. ("Putin pledged solemnly to hang me by the balls. He couldn't succeed in that," he says.) The Russians refuse to speak to Saakashvili at all. They continue to accuse him of genocide, a dubious description for a conflict that resulted in 358 South Ossetian deaths...