Word: tskhinvali
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Right now he presides over the stability of squalor. Burnt cars and blown-out windows litter the outskirts of Tskhinvali, South Ossetia's largest town and self-styled capital. Kokoity's government received 10 billion rubles - $324 million at the current exchange rate - from Moscow to reverse the damage wrought by the five-day war. But residents have seen little evidence of any such spending. (See pictures of Russia's war with Georgia...
...What remains unclear is which one of them moved first. Russia contends that on the night the war began, Aug. 7, they were simply responding to a Georgian attack on the South Ossetian capital of Tskhinvali and the threat to the lives of Russian and Ossetian civilians there. But that scenario does not explain the widely documented buildup since the spring of Russian forces just across the border from South Ossetia, which made it possible for up to 150 tanks to cross into South Ossetia within hours of the Russian order to attack...
...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...
...that firm footing, a representative from Russia's Federal Prosecutor's Office, speaking at the expanding Ministry of Emergency Services base at Tskhinvali's Repubican Hospital, said his office was searching for indisputable proof of Georgian military aggression against Russian peacekeepers during Georgia's initial attack of South Ossetia...
...Georgia's decision to step up attacks two weeks ago on Ossetian positions in Tskhinvali - a decision that, some observers say, gave the Russians a pretext to invade - he responds: "There was no choice. The choice was either resist or don't resist and watch Russia overrun our country and come all the way to the capital." Russia's ambitions, he explains later, are not restricted to South Ossetia. "They came for all of Georgia," he says. "They saw that we are prospering here and they wanted to put an end to that." And, of course, there was the international...