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Russia And Georgia 'At War', Over 1000 Dead
Russian armored vehicles have entered the northern edges of the capital of the breakaway Georgian region of South Ossetia, the separatists' press service reported on its website on Friday."Russian armored vehicles have entered the northern suburbs of Tskhinvali," the website cominf.org reported, adding that Georgian troops had started to retreat. Moscow said its troops were responding to a Georgian assault to re-take the breakaway region, and Georgia's pro-Western President Mikheil Saakashvili said the two countries were at war. Russia would cut air links with Georgia from midnight on Friday, the Russian Transport Ministry said. Saakashvili told BBC World television Russia had been massing troops on the northern border of Georgia for months. " They have been calling it training exercises, but they have not been concealing the fact that they are training these troops for use inside Georgia," he said. "The way the escalation went was we came first under extensive artillery barrage from the separatists ... but in the end I was told that Russian armored vehicles started to cross the Georgian border. And that was exactly the moment when I had to take this decision to fire back." The United States on Friday asserted its support for Georgia's territorial integrity and urged an immediate ceasefire. NATO and the European Union have joined calls for a halt to fighting. State Department spokesman Gonzalo Gallegos also said the United States was sending an envoy to the region "to engage with the parties in the conflict." U.S. President George W. Bush discussed the situation with Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin in Beijing, where world leaders were attending the opening of the Olympic Games, the White House said, giving no further information. A South Ossetia minister said more than a thousand people had died in overnight shelling by Georgian forces of their capital Tskhinvali, Russia's RIA news agency reported. "According to our information, as a result of the night-time shelling of Tskhinvali ... the number of fatalities is more than a thousand," Nationalities Minister Teimuraz Kasaev told the news agency by telephone. A senior Georgian security official said Russian planes had bombed the Vaziani military outside the Georgian capital Tbilisi. The Interior Ministry said later three Georgian soldiers were killed. Political analysts saw Georgia's bid to re-take its rebel region of South Ossetia by force as a gamble by its leader that he could still count on Western support in a clash with Russia. "He is in big danger of losing the cachet he built up for himself in being pro-Western and the restraint he has often shown in the face of provocation by Russia," said James Nixey, analyst at the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London,. "If he is going to start a war, he is going to lose the support of a lot of friends in the West." Saakashvili, who wants to take his small Caucasus nation into NATO, has made it a priority to win back control of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, another rebel region on the Black Sea. The issue has bedeviled Georgia's relations with Russia, angered by Tbilisi's moves towards the Western fold and its pursuit of NATO membership. As fighting raged, the roar of warplanes and the explosion of heavy shells resounded more than three km (two miles) from Tskhinvali. Many houses were ablaze. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov accused the Georgians of driving people from their homes. "We are receiving reports that a policy of ethnic cleansing was being conducted in villages in South Ossetia, the number of refugees is climbing, the panic is growing, people are trying to save their lives," he said in televised remarks from the ministry. The crisis, the first to confront Russian President Dmitry Medvedev since he took office in May, has flared in a region emerging as a key energy transit route, and where Russia and the West are vying for influence. It dented sentiment on Russia's benchmark equity index, which fell more than 4 percent to a 14-month low while the rouble lost more than 1 percent against a basket of currencies. Medvedev vowed to defend Russian "compatriots" in South Ossetia, where most people have been given Russian passports. "We will not allow their deaths to go unpunished," Interfax quoted him as saying. The majority of the roughly 70,000 people living in South Ossetia are ethnically distinct from Georgians. They say they were forcibly absorbed into Georgia under Soviet rule and now want to exercise their right to self-determination. Posted by: Anonymoose 2008-08-08 |
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