Georgia-Russia conflict may have been brewing for years
TBILISI, Georgia — The Russian diplomat said he couldn't make it. He had a flat tire. The Georgian official in charge of bringing breakaway regions back into the fold was incredulous.
Temuri Yakobashvili had driven up to South Ossetia from the Georgian capital to begin Russian-mediated peace talks to end months of escalating fighting in the disputed pro-Moscow republic. But the Russian hadn't shown up.
"Can't you change the tire?" Yakobashvili says he asked Uri Popov, the Russian diplomat. No, he replied. The spare was flat, too.
Fewer than 12 hours later, war between Russia and Georgia began, a conflict that has roiled the volatile, oil-rich Caucasus, raised tensions between Moscow and the West and nearly crushed this small U.S. ally.
But long before that flat tire, both sides had set their course for conflict, analysts and officials in Washington, D.C., Tbilisi and Moscow say: A combination of Russia's relentless drive toward confrontation and Georgian hubris made last week's warfare inevitable.
To some observers, the course was set after the 2004 election of Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili. On Russia's southern border, Georgia had been under Moscow's sway for centuries. Now, the U.S.-educated Saakashvili was turning the country into a staunchly nationalist, pro-American laboratory for Velvet Revolution-style agitation.
A trove of evidence strongly suggests that Russia was preparing the logistics for war well before Aug. 7. As long as three years ago, diplomats, officials and analysts say, Moscow started waging a multi-pronged propaganda, military and economic campaign against Georgia as it moved hurriedly and provocatively into the Western sphere — and possibly even into NATO, Russia's Cold War nemesis, itself.
"The political decision was made in April," said Pavel Felgenhauer, a military analyst in Moscow who writes for the Jamestown Foundation, a Washington think tank, and Russian publications. "It was final. Preparations were being in place for a year beforehand."
Many observers say the Georgians, with the United States in their corner, became overly confident of their capabilities.
"These are the most romantic people in the world. They're very gallant, in the stupid sense," said Bruce P. Jackson, a close administration ally who has worked extensively with Saakashvili and other leaders in the emerging democracies of the former Soviet bloc. "Do they really listen? They're very much 'the charge of the light brigade' people. It has a lot to do with personal honor."
At any moment, analysts say, Georgia might have staved off a full-on military attack by heeding Moscow's warnings and renouncing or at least qualifying his country's desire to join NATO.
Instead, Saakashvili reportedly made jokes about Russian Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin's height.
Eduard Shevardnadze, too, was disliked by Putin's team. After all, the Georgian president who preceded Saakashvili was the same man who, as Mikhail Gorbachev's foreign minister, oversaw the end of the Soviet Union and the dismemberment of its empire — an event that Putin described as the greatest disaster of the 20th century.
But the diplomat managed to balance the country's pro-Western tilt with enough deference to Moscow to keep Georgia mostly off the Kremlin's radar.
"Shevardnadze was very careful," said Alexander Rondeli, president at the Georgian Foundation for Strategic and International Studies. "He balanced everything."
