Word: tbilisi
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...morning this week, he was pacing back and forth at a Russian military checkpoint just outside the war torn city of Gori, talking angrily on his mobile telephone . For more than two hours he had been attempting to escort a delegation of European officials to Gori from the capital Tbilisi. A journey that ordinarily should take 40 minutes was already into its third hour. "I am the foreign relations committee chairman in the Georgian Parliament and it just took us 40 minutes to go a few meters," he told me on the outskirts of the deserted, Russian-occupied town...
...Ossetian irregulars beat him in the courtyard of his home. With many villages reduced to burned-out shells, looters were seen hauling off TVs, refrigerators and other household appliances. On the road to the Russian border, graffiti on the side of a building read THANK YOU, RUSSIA! But in Tbilisi, President Mikheil Saakashvili remained defiant. "They are badly dressed, badly equipped, and many of them are drunk," he told Time. "There are just a lot of them...
Israel's weapons sales, just like Russia's, are driven by the commercial interests of domestic arms industries. Israeli military exports to Georgia are driven more by the logic of business than by a strategic choice to back Tbilisi against Moscow - indeed, the Israeli response since the outbreak of hostilities is a reminder that, on balance, even a relatively cool friendship with Russia may be more important to Israel than a close alliance with tiny Georgia. Despite Israel's pecuniary imperative, Georgia has used these commercial military ties to press closer ties on Israel...
President Saakashvili has noted that both his minister responsible for negotiations over South Ossetia (Yakobashvili) and his Defense Minister, Davit Kezerashvili, had lived in Israel before moving to post-Soviet Georgia. According to the Israeli daily Haaretz, the Georgian leader this week enthused that in Tbilisi, "both war and peace are in the hands of Israeli Jews." Working through the Georgian Defense Ministry (and with the approval of its Israeli counterpart), Israeli companies are reported to have supplied the Georgians with pilotless drones, night-vision equipment, anti-aircraft equipment, shells, rockets and various electronic systems. Even more important than equipment...
...midnight, but Georgia's President Mikheil Saakashvili is just hitting his stride. In an interview in the fortress-like presidential residence on a hill in downtown Tbilisi, dressed in a blue suit and light blue silk tie, he fields questions in French and English, trades text messages with an aide, and holds forth on topics ranging from current and historic confrontations between his country and Moscow, to the number of Russian passports distributed last year in Crimea (177,000). He refers to European foreign ministers by first name, chats about John McCain and his wife, expected shortly on a humanitarian...