Hurriyet

...

GEORGIA TO LEAVE CIS

Saakashvili said he would pull his country out of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) grouping ex-Soviet states, Russian news agencies reported.

"We are leaving the CIS for good and propose that other countries leave this body run by Russia," Interfax news agency said Saakashvili told a big rally in his support outside Georgia's parliament.

RUSSIA DENIES GEORGIAN PEACEKEEPERS

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said earlier Moscow could not agree to the plan if it included Georgians in a future peacekeeping force because they had attacked Russian colleagues during Tbilisi's push to recapture breakaway South Ossetia.

"They can no longer remain. They brought shame upon themselves as peacekeepers. They committed crimes," he told a news conference.

Lavrov also said the "only way" to end fighting in Georgia is with a total Georgian withdrawal from the breakaway South Ossetia region and an agreement to renounce the use of force, adding Saakashvili should leave office.

"It would be best if he left," Lavrov told a news conference. "I don't think Russia will feel like talking with Mr. Saakashvili after what he did to our citizens," Lavrov said.
..

Civil Georgia
Russian forces have again appeared in Poti on Georgia’s Black Sea coast destroying key military installations there, including radar systems, a Georgian government source told Civil.Ge.

Russian soldiers first entered the Poti port on August 11 and occupied the coast guard facilities, but later they left the town.

Telegraph, UK - In addition to six points proposed by European leaders, Russia wants Georgia to agree to further measures which would in effect guarantee Moscow's capture of the two breakaway Georgian regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia.

Russia wants a buffer zone around these enclaves, from which all Georgian forces will be excluded, and is demanding that Georgia give a signed pledge never to use force in the regions again.

...

Asked about the progress of the peace plan, President Sarkozy said: "The night is young. We are not at peace yet but we are at a stage of temporary cessation of hostilities, which is certainly significant." He added that the EU could provide peacekeepers to be stationed in South Ossetia if all sides agreed.

President Saakhashvili said that he would continue to regard Russian troops in the breakaway states as occupying forces. He said Georgia would refuse to be "broken to pieces" under any agreement. Georgia also disclosed that it had filed a lawsuit against Russia at the International Court of Justice for ethnic cleansing.

...

The news conference came shortly after Russian forces continued to shell the strategically important Georgian town of Gori, in an attack representing a continuation of Moscow's military offensive, even after President Medvedev had ordered a cessation to hostilities.

The artillery barrage – the first against Gori since the five-day conflict began – suggested that, despite denials in Moscow, Russian ground troops had advanced into undisputed Georgian territory from South Ossetia. Gori, a town of about 70,000 people that was the birth place of Stalin, lies 15 miles south of Georgia's internal border with the breakaway region.

...

However, over half an hour after Mr Medvedev gave his ceasefire order, The Daily Telegraph saw three Russian helicopters fire nine missiles at targets 25 miles north of Tbilisi. It was not immediately clear what they were shooting at.

"Despite the Russian president's claims earlier this morning that military operations against Georgia have been suspended, at this moment, Russian fighter jets are bombarding two Georgian villages outside South Ossetia," the Georgian government said.

Eduard Kokoity, the leader of the South Ossetian separatist movement, said that following the conflict he would redouble his efforts to have his province unified with the Russian region of North Ossetia. He said: "I would like to point out again that we are a small, divided people. This is a big humanitarian problem and of course we will strive for unification with North Ossetia."

...

Georgia entering South Ossetia and going forward?

Commenters at Firedoglake wrote that the US military trainers and some US generals were in Georgia beginning in mid-July, witht he training exercises ending on the Thursday before the Friday incursion and military action in Ossetia. However, the Pentagon says nothing was apparent to any of the American advisers/generals.

Also, an article in Izvestia (in Russian) linked to by a commenter there purportedly says witnesses in Ossetia reported seeing Black soliders, possibly Americans, among the Georgian fighters killed. Some were wearing black uniforms, with the commenter noting that Blackwater, etc., tends to wear black.

Seemed awfully interesting, so I googled for news articles on such findings. Nothing came up.

Anyone have info, know anything?

Asia Times OnLine...a well-written piece: The end of the post-Cold War era
By M K Bhadrakumar

Also read Spengler’s, “Putin for US President—more than ever.

----

Wonderful to hear hostilities are over between Russia and Georgia. Too many were lost, but the number haven't as yet been confirmed. Now that hostilities have ceased, that figure should be known very soon. The biased reporting for this particular war, seemed particularly marked. Credible reporters seemed to be absent from the war zone.

--
http://bexhuff.com
Of COURSE you can trust the US Government! Just ask the Indians.

Russian membership of global clubs at stake:US

WASHINGTON, Aug 12 (Reuters) - Russian integration into international institutions such as the World Trade Organization is at stake because of Moscow's military operations in Georgia, a senior U.S. official said on Tuesday.

"Russia is going to have to ensure its integration into the WTO, and OECD (the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development), and the G8 (the Group of Eight nations), and institutions like that," the U.S. official told reporters, referring to plans by the government of Russian President Dmitry Medvedev to join important global clubs.

"Frankly, the entire Medvedev agenda is at stake here," the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity. The United States would like to see that agenda succeed, but "that's what's at stake when Russia engages in behavior that looks like it's from another time." hahahhaahahahah

Russia's WTO entry not close - U.S. Commerce chief
12 Aug 2008 20:13:38 GMT
By Doug Palmer

WASHINGTON, Aug 12 (Reuters) - A top Bush administration official on Tuesday played down any connection between Russia's military action in Georgia and Moscow's long-term bid to join the World Trade Organization.

"We've worked with Russia in terms of the WTO accession and they still have a ways to go. So it's not as though they're close to it. They still have some work to do before they get to it," U.S. Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez said in an interview with Reuters.

U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama has called for a review of Russia's bid to join the WTO after Moscow took military action against Georgia in a conflict over South Ossetia, a breakaway region of Georgia.

"We should ... convene other international forums to condemn this aggression, to call for an immediate halt to the violence and to review multilateral and bilateral arrangements with Russia -- including Russia's interest in joining the World Trade Organization," Obama said. more

US likely to cancel Russia exercise due to Georgia

truce

Russia and Georgia have agreed on a truce brokered by French President Nicolas Sarkozy, and have approved the principles of a full peace plan.

SIX-POINT PEACE PLAN

No more use of force
Stop all military actions for good
Free access to humanitarian aid
Georgian troops return to their places of permanent deployment
Russian troops return to pre-conflict positions
International talks about future status of South Ossetia and Abkhazia

---

Nothing appears to have been written in stone, the details will be worked out by the parties involved along with members of the Security Council.

and this time Russia controls European energy supplies.

Hmm. This is going to get interesting, as in the ancient Chinese curse, "May you live in interesting times."

...who's going to be next? There's a lot of old Soviet Central Asia for Moscow to reclaim...

BBC, August 13

Violence has flared up in Georgia, where Russian tanks have been seen patrolling the town of Gori, says the BBC's Gavin Hewitt near the scene.

One witness told the BBC he saw a convoy of Russian vehicles on the road to the Georgian capital Tbilisi. [Other reports [Georgian villages burned and looted as Russian tanks advance] say they've retreated from this - Raja]

People leaving the town say there is looting going on involving South Ossetian separatists.

The BBC's Sarah Rainsford in the South Ossetian capital, Tskhinvali, says many buildings have been totally destroyed.

A ceasefire is in place, but it seems to be very fragile, correspondents say.

In Gori, the Russian tanks seem to be dismantling and destroying Georgian army bases in the town, our correspondent says.

Itar-Tass, August 14

MOSCOW -- Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov believes that any talk about Georgia’s territorial integrity is no longer relevant.

“One can forget about any talk about Georgia’s territorial integrity, because, I believe, it is impossible to persuade South Ossetia and Abkhazia to agree with the logic they can be forced back into the Georgian state.”

It seems very little has been said about their involvement.

By Tom Lasseter and Jonathan S. Landay | McClatchy Newspapers

GORI, Georgia — Russian troops, in seeming violation of a cease-fire agreement set only on Tuesday, embarked Wednesday on what Georgian officials called a deliberate and systematic attempt to demolish what remains of the Georgian military.

The actions ignited an angry response from the United States, with President Bush demanding that Moscow withdraw its forces from Georgia.

The president also announced that U.S. military aircraft and ships would begin delivering humanitarian aid to the former Soviet republic in a "vigorous and ongoing" operation and that U.S. officials would expect unfettered access to Georgia’s ports and highways.

"The United States stands with the democratically elected government of Georgia and insists that the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Georgia be respected," Bush said in a brief White House appearance with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Robert Gates by his side.

The decision to dispatch aid aboard military aircraft potentially put the United States and Russia on a collision course. Pentagon officials said they were taking pains to make sure that the Russians were fully informed of all U.S. actions toi avoid isunderstandings.

The U.S. action came on a day when Russian troops demonstrated that they could go anywhere they wanted in Georgia, and no one could stop them.

Moving well beyond the supposed truce lines in the breakaway province of South Ossetia, Russian forces occupied the town of Gori, where the Georgians have a military installation. They then moved along the highway toward Tbilisi, the Georgian capital, and occupied a second Georgian military base, according to Georgian national security council spokesman Zurab Katchkatchishvili.

In Georgia's west, Katchkatchishvili said, Russian forces burned three Georgian coast guard vessels in the Black Sea port of Poti.

"Clearly their intention is to destroy all military bases and equipment before pulling out," Katchkatchishvili said in a phone interview.

more

CSM

14 Aug 2008 15:35:43 GMT
Source: Reuters

MOSCOW, Aug 14 (Reuters) - Colonel-General Anatoly Nogovitsyn, deputy head of Russia's General Staff, on Thursday held his daily briefing on the Russian army's actions in Georgia.

Following are some key excerpts from the briefing:

ON U.S. AID TO GEORGIA

"We have information that American military-transport aviation say they are delivering a certain humanitarian cargo to Tbilisi airport, though they said we had bombed the airport two days ago."

"Lets ask them will they invite you (the media) to check whether it is humanitarian or not?... What is in it (the cargo) in reality?... It is of major concern to Russians."

ON CONTINUING CLASHES

"The last 24 hours, we are just watching the situation. There are still snipers out there, certain groups have gotten through, and the provocations are continuing."

"Perhaps now it is against a different background, but there are always these leftover problems."

"A military force that has not been warmed up, you can tell it to stop and it will stop. But these troops, you might say, are still carrying out the previous mission. There are still a lot of problems."

"But we will settle things with everyone, and right now establishing peace is the main issue."

ALLEGED OIL PIPELINE BOMB ATTEMPT

"Aside from an ecological disaster, it wouldn't result in anything.

"It is our principle that oil pipelines do not interest us."

"Why would anyone bomb oil pipelines? We did not bomb them."

ON BLACK SEA FLEET

"We have one general commander for the Black Sea fleet. It is the President of Russia. And all commands from outside are illegitimate to us."

ON RUSSIAN TROOPS IN GEORGIAN PORT OF POTI

"We are no longer fighting, believe me... We have a different problem now. Poti is one of those, and the geography is probably going to change. We switched into the capacity of peacekeepers."

"As far as Poti and other places are concerned, let's agree with you that if it (the place) is inside the peacekeeping zone of responsibility, then it is legitimate for intelligence, information and special groups to be there."

"We can't sit and do nothing, we need to proceed with intelligence operations and react adequately. This is our task, including during a time of peace."

"When the six-point peace plan came into force we had to make some contact with the local authorities."

"So what was reported (in the media) as 50 tanks was actually a small number of special forces tasked with moving in to establish contact with local authorities... We are now trying to work with them to carry out the commitments both sides have taken on."

ON RUSSIAN LOSSES

"It was not easy for the Georgian side to accept defeat. The fighting was very intense at the end with both sides using heavy weapons."

"This is the main cause for a large number of casualties... You know, it cost a great amount of blood to take Berlin."

"There have been some further losses (among Russian peacekeepers) from the work of clearing mines. This is a dirty job...and the areas in question have been mined quite heavily."

ON TROOPS WITHDRAWAL

"We are planning it. It depends on many factors. I can't give you the date. We have stopped building up troops."

"Georgian fighters in the Kodor gorge (in Abkhazia) are continuing to give up their arms and retreat. This is going on without conflict."

ON DOWNING GEORGIAN DRONES

"I think there will be regular leaks in the media which we will have to clarify. On (Georgian) drones - when I was in my office yesterday, there was one (downed by Russian forces), when I drove past the Moscow embankment, there was already two. In the morning there were three. In fact, there were none."

posted under fairuse

SALON

Russia's escalating war on Georgia reveals the consequences of the Bush administration's long assault on the international rule of law.

By Juan Cole

Aug. 14, 2008 | The run-up to the current chaos in the Caucasus should look quite familiar: Russia acted unilaterally rather than going through the U.N. Security Council. It used massive force against a small, weak adversary. It called for regime change in a country that had defied Moscow. It championed a separatist movement as a way of asserting dominance in a region it coveted.

Indeed, despite George W. Bush and Dick Cheney's howls of outrage at Russian aggression in Georgia and the disputed province of South Ossetia, the Bush administration set a deep precedent for Moscow's actions -- with its own systematic assault on international law over the past seven years. Now, the administration's condemnations of Russia ring hollow.

Bush said on Monday, responding to reports that Russia might attack the Georgian capital, "It now appears that an effort may be under way to depose [Georgia's] duly elected government. Russia has invaded a sovereign neighboring state and threatens a democratic government elected by its people. Such an action is unacceptable in the 21st century." By Wednesday, with more Russian troops on the move and a negotiated cease-fire quickly unraveling, Bush stepped up the rhetoric, announcing a sizable humanitarian-aid mission to Georgia and dispatching Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to the region.

While U.S. leaders have tended to back Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, there are two sides to every dispute, and in the ethnically diverse Caucasus it may be more like a hundred sides. Abkhazia and Ossetia are claimed by Georgia, but they have their own distinctive languages, cultures and national aspirations. Both fought for independence in the early 1990s, without success, though neither was Georgia able to assert its full sovereignty over them, accepting Russian mediation and peacekeeping troops.

The separatist leaders of South Ossetia and Abkhazia now speak of Saakashvili in terms reminiscent of the way separatists in Darfur speak of Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir. Sergei Bagapsh of Abkhazia and Eduard Kokoity of South Ossetia have come out against conducting any further talks with Georgia, calling instead for Saakashvili to be tried for war crimes. Kokoity told Interfax, "There can be no talks with the organizers of genocide." The Russian press is full of talk of putting Saakashvili on trial for ordering attacks on Ossetian civilians.

All sides have committed massacres and behaved abominably. There are no clean hands involved, notwithstanding the strong support for Georgia visible in the press of most NATO member countries. (Georgia has been jockeying to join NATO, something Moscow stridently opposes.) Still, not everyone in NATO agrees that Saakashvili is a hero. While traveling with the negotiating team of President Nicolas Sarkozy, one French official observed that "Saakashvili was crazy enough to go in the middle of the night and bomb a city" in South Ossetia. The consequence of Russia's riposte, he said, is "a Georgia attacked, pulverized, through its own fault."

An emboldened Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin sarcastically likened Russia's actions to Bush's foreign policy. Pointing to the invasion of Iraq and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, Putin said, "Of course, Saddam Hussein ought to have been hanged for destroying several Shiite villages ... And the incumbent Georgian leaders who razed 10 Ossetian villages at once, who ran over elderly people and children with tanks, who burned civilians alive in their sheds -- these leaders must be taken under protection."

In the run-up to the Iraq war, Bush officials repeated ad nauseam the mantra that Saddam Hussein had killed his own people. Thus, they helped create a case for unilateral "humanitarian intervention" of the sort Putin says Russia is now pursuing. Washington had failed to get a U.N. Security Council resolution authorizing a war on Iraq, and Iraq had not attacked the United States, so no principle of self-defense was at stake. But since all governments (even the United States under Abraham Lincoln) repress separatist movements, often ruthlessly, Bush was turning actions such as Saakashvili's attack on South Ossetia into a more legitimate cause for an outside power (especially one bordering it) to wage war against Georgia.

Indeed, Putin's invoking Bush's Iraq adventure points directly to the way in which Bush has enabled other world powers to act impulsively. With his doctrine of preemptive warfare, Bush single-handedly tore down the architecture of post-World War II international law erected by the founders of the United Nations to ensure that rogue states did not go about launching wars of aggression the way Hitler had. While safeguarding minorities at risk is a praiseworthy goal, the U.N. Charter states that the Security Council must approve a war launched for this purpose or any other, excepting self-defense. No individual nation is authorized to wage aggressive war on a vigilante basis, as Bush did in Iraq or Russia is now doing in the Caucasus.

Eight years ago, the United States would have been in a position to condemn Russia for its unilateral war without necessarily seeming hypocritical. After all, even the Korean War had been sanctioned by the United Nations, and President Dwight Eisenhower had condemned the 1956 tripartite attack on Egypt by Britain, France and Israel for violating the U.N. Charter.

more at Salon, short ad to watch

as of the 19th
Georgian conflict aftermath more complex than officially presented / Threats to kick Russia out of G8 are somewhat empty - analyst / USA may support projects to build new transit pipelines via Russia - analyst/ Russian army may stay in South Ossetia forever / Russian major defense companies' revenues up by 40%/ Russia to rebuild Iraq's Soviet-era power plants /

details at the link

RIA Novosti

_{"The mythical John McCain is an affable, straight-talking, moderately conservative war hero who is an expert on foreign policy" - Bob Herbert}