‘A Rússia reconheceu a independência da Ossétia do Sul e da Abkhazia‘ in Guardian, 27 de Agosto de 2008

Russia's relations with the west plunged to their most critical point in a generation today when the Kremlin built on its military rout of Georgia by recognising the breakaway provinces of South Ossetia and Abkhazia as independent states.

Declaring that if his decision meant a new cold war, then so be it, President Dmitri Medvedev signed a decree conferring Russian recognition on Georgia's two secessionist regions. The move flouted UN Security Council resolutions and dismissed western insistence during the crisis of the past three weeks on respecting Georgia's territorial integrity and international borders.

Tonight, Medvedev accused Washington of shipping arms to Georgia under the guise of humanitarian aid.

The Kremlin's unilateral decision to redraw the map of the strategically vital region on the Black Sea surprised and alarmed the west, and raised the stakes in the Caucasus crisis. Moscow challenged Europe and the US to respond, while calculating that western divisions over policy towards Russia would dilute any damage.

Washington condemned the move. Britain called for a European coalition against Russian "aggression". Sweden said Russia had opted for a path of confrontation with the west, and international organisations denounced Medvedev's move as illegitimate and unacceptable.

"We are not afraid of anything, including the prospect of a new cold war," Medvedev said. "Russia is a state which has to ensure its interests along the whole length of its border. This is absolutely clear."

While Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, accused the US, a strong backer of President Mikheil Saakashvili of Georgia, of gunboat diplomacy by using its air force and naval vessels to deliver humanitarian aid to Georgia, Medvedev tonight went further.

He said Russian forces were not blockading Georgia's Black Sea port of Poti. "There is no blockade. Any ship can get in, American and others are bringing in humanitarian cargoes. And what the Americans call humanitarian cargoes - of course, they are bringing in weapons," he told the BBC.

The Nato secretary-general, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, said: "Russia's actions in recent weeks call into question Russia's commitment to peace and stability in the Caucasus."

But Moscow oozed confidence that the western response would be mostly bark and little bite, restricted to sharp words and some tolerable diplomatic sanctions. "I don't think we should be afraid of isolation. I don't believe isolation is looming," said Lavrov. "This should not really be a doomsday scenario."

The Kremlin decision, prepared on Monday by the rubber stamp of the Russian parliament's unanimous vote in favour of independence for South Ossetia and Abkhazia, is widely seen as presaging Russian annexation at least of South Ossetia, a poor, crime-ridden mountain region of only 70,000 people which has little prospect of becoming a viable state.

South Ossetia was the spark that ignited the crisis earlier this month after Saakashvili launched a disastrous attempt to recapture the region and met a Russian invasion which crippled his country.

"Russia's actions are an attempt to militarily annex a sovereign nation ...in direct violation of international law," Saakashvili said tonight. "The Russian Federation is seeking to validate the use of violence, direct military aggression, and ethnic cleansing to forcibly change the borders of a neighbouring state."

But senior Russian officials, from Medvedev down, launched a concerted attack on Saakashvili, accusing him of "genocide", of seeking to "exterminate" the people of South Ossetia, and of leaving Russia no alternative.

"This is not an easy choice to make, but it represents the only possibility to save human lives," said Medvedev. "Saakashvili opted for genocide to accomplish his political objectives. By doing so, he himself dashed all the hopes for the peaceful coexistence of Ossetians, Abkhazians and Georgians in a single state."

Lavrov said Russia's decision was "absolutely inevitable, short of losing our dignity as a nation".

Dmitri Rogozin, Russia's ambassador to Nato, likened the international climate to the summer of 1914 before the first world war, and compared the Georgian leader to Gavrilo Princip, the Balkan assassin who shot the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne in Sarajevo.

Russia's decision to recognise the two regions effectively killed off the ceasefire and peace plan negotiated a fortnight ago by France's President Nicolas Sarkozy on behalf of the European Union.

Exasperated by Russia's refusal to observe the terms of the truce, Sarkozy has already called an emergency EU summit for Monday in Brussels. The meeting was supposed to chart a common EU position on Russia, but is as likely to expose Europe's dilemmas and divisions over how to deal with an increasingly assertive Kremlin.

"The [EU] presidency firmly condemns this decision," a spokesman for Sarkozy said. "It calls for a political solution to the conflicts in Georgia. It will examine the consequences of Russia's decision from this point of view."

David Miliband, Britain's foreign secretary, said he wanted to forge "the widest possible coalition against Russian aggression in Georgia. We fully support Georgia's independence and territorial integrity, which cannot be changed by decree from Moscow."

But Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, while denouncing the Russian move as "absolutely unacceptable", also said she wanted to keep dialogue running with Moscow.

Miliband is due to fly to Kiev today to express British support for the Ukrainian government which fears it could be next in line for Russian pressure aimed at thwarting its efforts to join Nato. Miliband is due to meet Ukraine's president, Viktor Yushchenko, and its prime minister, Yulia Tymoshenko, whose government is in a precarious position: seeking membership of Nato and the EU in the face of determined opposition from the country's Russian minority.

Under a lease agreement, Russia's Black Sea fleet is based on Ukraine's Crimean peninsula, increasing Russian sensitivity to Ukraine's westward trajectory and Ukrainian vulnerability to pressure from Moscow.

Miliband will make a speech today to a university audience in Kiev, in which he will laud Ukrainian democracy and warn Russia that its actions will cause long-term harm to its standing on the world stage.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/aug/26/russia.georgia2
JPTF 2008/08/27

‘A WEB tornou-se um campo de batalha no conflito entre a Rússia e a Geórgia‘ in International Herald Tribune

Weeks before physical bombs started falling on Georgia, a security researcher in suburban Massachusetts was watching an attack against the country in cyberspace.

Jose Nazario of Arbor Networks in Lexington noticed there was a stream of data directed at Georgian government sites containing the message win+love+in+Rusia.

Other Internet experts in the United States said the attacks against Georgia's Internet infrastructure began as early as July 20, with coordinated barrages of millions of requests - known as distributed denial of service, or D.D.O.S., attacks - that overloaded certain Georgian servers.

Researchers at Shadowserver, a volunteer group that tracks malicious network activity, reported that the Web site of the Georgian president, Mikheil Saakashvili, had been rendered inoperable for 24 hours by multiple D.D.O.S. attacks. The researchers said the command-and-control server that directed the attack, which was based in the United States, had come online several weeks before it began the assault.

As it turns out, the July attack was only a dress rehearsal for an all-out cyberwar once the shooting started between Georgia and Russia.

According to Internet technical experts, it was the first time a cyberattack had coincided with a real war. But it will likely not be the last, said Bill Woodcock, the research director of Packet Clearing House, a nonprofit organization that tracks Internet traffic. He said cyberattacks are so inexpensive and easy to mount, with few fingerprints, that they will almost certainly remain a feature of modern warfare.

"It costs about 4 cents per machine," Woodsock said. "You could fund an entire cyberwarfare campaign for the cost of replacing a tank tread, so you would be foolish not to."

Shadowserver saw the attack against Georgia spread to computers throughout the government after Russian troops invaded the Georgian province of South Ossetia on Sunday.

The Georgian government blamed Russia, but experts said that was not clear.

"Could this somehow be indirect Russian action? Yes, but considering Russia is past playing nice and uses real bombs, they could have attacked more strategic targets or eliminated the infrastructure kinetically," said Gadi Evron, an Israeli network security expert who assisted in pushing back a huge cyberattack on Estonia's Internet infrastructure in May. "The nature of what's going on isn't clear."

Nazario said the attacks appeared to be politically motivated. They were continuing Monday against Georgian news sites, according to Nazario. "I'm watching attacks against apsny.ge and news.ge right now," he said.

The attacks were controlled from a server based at a telecommunications firm in Moscow, he said. In contrast, the attacks last month came from a control computer that was based in the United States. That system was later disabled.

Denial-of-service attacks, aimed at making a Web site unreachable, began in 2001 and have been refined in terms of power and sophistication since then. They are usually performed by hundreds or thousands of commandeered personal computers, making it difficult or impossible to determine who is behind a particular attack.

The Web site of the Georgian president was moved to an Internet operation in the United States run by a Georgian native over the weekend. The company, Tulip Systems, based in Atlanta, is run by Nino Doijashvili, who was in Georgia at the time of the attack. Two Web sites, president.gov.ge and rustavi2.com, the Web site of a prominent Georgian TV station, were moved to Atlanta. Computer security executives said the new sites had also come under attack.

On Monday, executives from Renesys, an Internet monitoring company based in New Hampshire, said that most Georgian networks were unaffected, although individual Web sites might be under attack. Networks appeared and disappeared as power was cut off and restored as a result of the war, they said. A company researcher noted that Georgia is dependent on both Russia and Turkey for connections to the Internet.

As a result of the interference, the Georgian government began posting news dispatches to a Google-run blogging Web site, georgiamfa.blogspot.com. Separately, there were reports that Estonia was sending technical assistance to the Georgian government.

There were indications that both sides in the conflict - or sympathizers - were engaged in attacks aimed at blocking access to Web sites. On Friday, the Russian-language Web site Lenta.ru reported that there had been D.D.O.S. attacks targeted at the official Web site of the government of South Ossetia as well as attacks against RIA Novosti, a Russian news agency.

Internet researchers at Sophos, a computer security firm headquartered in England, said that the National Bank of Georgia's Web site was defaced at one point. Images of 20th-century dictators as well as an image of Saakashvili, were placed on the site.

http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/08/12/europe/cyber.php
JPTF 2008/08/14

‘A primeira guerra entre a Rússia e um ex-Estado soviético?‘ in Der Spiegel Online, 10 de Agosto de 2008

The South Ossetian coat of arms depicts a snow leopard raising its paw in a threatening gesture, against a backdrop of impregnable mountains. The warlike South Ossetians' most famous son was a man whose name alone instills fear: Josef Stalin.

But none of this was enough to deter Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili when he ordered his army to invade Tskhinvali, the capital of separatist South Ossetia, a region in the center of Georgia, on Thursday night. Skirmishes had been going on for weeks, and on Thursday evening Saakashvili had even announced a ceasefire. But then, at around midnight, Georgian forces attacked in an effort "to reestablish constitutional order," as a high-ranking Georgian general described it.

Within hours Georgian units, using rockets and fighter jets, had apparently demolished entire streets of Tskhinvali. The "president" of South Ossetia, Eduard Kokoity, a former freestyle wrestler, said on Friday evening that an estimated 1,400 people had died and characterized the Georgian invasion as ethnic cleansing. Saakashvili, however, announced the mobilization of 100,000 reservists.

It didn't take long before the Ossetians' protectors retaliated with the full force of their military machine. Russia sent two tank columns of its 58th Army to Tskhinvali to repel Saakashvili's units, Sukhoi fighter jets bombed Georgian military bases near the capital Tbilisi and the Black Sea port of Poti, far from the actual conflict region. Georgia, for its part, reported that its forces had shot down four fighter jets over its own territory.

Few of the roughly 25,000 residents of the South Ossetian capital were able to flee, with most hiding in the cellars of their meager houses. Doctors performed surgery in the corridors at the city's main hospital, and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, vacationing on the Volga River, flew back to Moscow for a crisis meeting of the National Security Council.

The Russians called the Georgian invasion a "deceitful attack," while the Georgians referred to the Russian incursion as a "war on our own territory." When US President George W. Bush and Vladimir Putin met at the Olympic Games in Beijing, the Russian Prime Minister confirmed that a war had "practically just begun" in the Caucasus and announced, in his typically pithy style, "retaliation." The United Nations Security Council convened in New York, while NATO officials in Brussels expressed "serious concern."

If the prediction Putin made on Chinese soil becomes reality, the world will see the first hot war between Russian and a former Soviet state, a war only 3,000 kilometers (1,875 miles) from the European capital, Brussels.

Even if temporary calm returns to the situation, on the day of the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games a conflict was forced onto the global political agenda that Americans and Russians have long fomented, and yet that neither Washington nor Moscow could have any interest in encouraging. And all of this revolves around an impoverished region about one-and-a-half times the size of Luxembourg.

But the real conflict is not as much about Tskhinvali, but about the former rivals in the Cold War. In no region have they been as hostile toward each other since the fall of the Soviet Union than they are now in the Caucasus. The South Ossetians, supported by Moscow, and the Georgians, who have received US military assistance, are bitter enemies. From the Russian standpoint, Ossetia has been an important strategic base near the Turkish and Iranian frontiers since the days of the czars. The Americans, on the other hand, are courting Georgia, which they see as a way to curb Moscow's influence in the southern Caucasus. Georgia is also an important transit country for oil being pumped from the Caspian Sea to the Turkish port of Ceyhan and a potential base for Washington efforts to encircle Tehran.

Twenty years ago, the Ossetians wouldn't have dreamed that they would ever be in the headlines. They were among the losers when once-oppressed regions received their independence after the breakup of the Soviet Union. The Ossetians were divided, with the north remaining part of Russian and the south counted, under international law, as part of now-independent Georgia since 1992. But the "Republic of South Ossetia," which is not recognized internationally, declared its independence from Tbilisi. In the early 1990s, when Georgian autocrat Zviad Gamsakhurdia attempted to crush all efforts at autonomy in South Ossetia, sending irregular troops into Tskhinvali, tens of thousands of Ossetians, who had previously numbered 160,000, fled to stay with their relatives in the Russian region of North Ossetia.
About 1,000 people died on both sides in the ensuing two-and-a-half-year war, and tens of thousands of Georgians were driven out of South Ossetia. Then former Russian President Boris Yeltsin and Gamsakhurdia's successor, former Russian Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze, signed a ceasefire agreement. Although that agreement was occasionally violated, it remained largely intact until last week.

In a November 2006 referendum, 99 percent of South Ossetians voted for independence from Georgia, at a time when most of them had long held Russian passports. This enabled Russian President Medvedev to justify his military's open invasion of neighboring Georgia on Friday as an effort to "protect the lives and dignity of Russian citizens, wherever they may be."

Since Friday, the new man in Moscow's Kremlin finds himself in a delicate situation. Barely three months in office, Medvedev is already being denounced as "soft," and 36 percent of Russians still consider Putin to be the true strong man. And it is Putin, even though he is now only the prime minister, who has managed to score points in foreign policy in the past three months, not Medvedev. A victorious Saakashvili in Tskhinvali would spell Medvedev's premature political demise.

Faced with this prospect, Medvedev will continue what Putin once began. The former Kremlin chief repeatedly stressed that a "precedent" was set when the United States, Great Britain and other NATO states recognized the independence of the former Serbian province of Kosovo. It was at that point that Moscow reasoned that it could claim the same right for the South Ossetians and the Abkhazians, another group seeking independence from Georgia, and it demonstratively expanded its support for the two separatist provinces. At the same time, a speedy conquest of Tskhinvali became even less of a reality for Saakashvili.

The West never knew quite how to approach this game the Kremlin was playing, just as it was taken by surprise by Friday's escalation. Only a few days earlier, both Washington and Moscow had simultaneously announced their strong commitment to preventing war in the region. On the other hand, both the Americans and NATO had repeatedly insisted, in their dealings with the Russians, on "preserving the territorial integrity of Georgia." This essentially meant that South Ossetia and Abkhazia were, in their view, part of Saakashvili's country. Of course, they had also wisely refrained from explaining how the separatist territories were to be brought back into the fold. The conflict in the Caucasus was a sore and divisive issue within both NATO and the European Union.

While the EU's Eastern European members repeatedly called for solidarity with Tbilisi, and the Estonian foreign minister, to the dismay of his Western European counterparts, even suggested sending EU troops to the Caucasus, the French blocked any commitment to support the Georgians. The Germans chose a middle course and attempted to mediate in the embattled region, while at the same time shelving the question of the disputed territories' status.

The conflict came to the fore in early April, at the NATO summit in Bucharest, Romania. When US President Bush proposed accepting Georgia into the Western defense alliance's "Action Plan for Membership," a precursor to NATO membership, 10 member states refused to support his plan, including Germany, France and Italy. They argued that accepting the Georgians was problematic, because of the conflicts in Abkhazia and South Ossetia. What they were really saying was that they would not be willing to back Georgia if, under Article 5 of the NATO treaty, they were ever forced to defend the country as part of a joint defense effort.

This may have been sending the wrong signal to the Caucasus, because tensions increased from that point on. Moscow felt emboldened in its position and entered into quasi-official relations with the breakaway separatist provinces -- a de facto annexation as far as the Georgians were concerned.

The then Foreign Minister David Bakradze called the NATO decision a mistake and an angry Tbilisi withdrew its troops from Kosovo. It was time for Europe to finally "show that it stands by its values," Saakashvili said during a visit to Berlin, where he stressed that "what is at stake here is the whole post-Cold War security order in Europe." Russia, Saakashvili argued, is engaging in a policy of redistribution, and Georgia is only the beginning. "Tomorrow it will be Ukraine, the Baltic states and Poland," the Georgian president predicted, returning his focus to the Americans.

The Americans have been closely aligned with Saakashvili since the 40-year-old hothead's days at Columbia University in New York, especially after he assumed power in the 2003 "Rose Revolution." US presidential candidate John McCain (who would like to see Russia ousted from the Group of Eight industrialized nations, or G-8) even traveled to Tbilisi at the time and handed Saakashvili a bulletproof vest. Since then, Saakashvili has considered the Republican a "personal friend."

In recent years, the Americans have provided Georgia with more than $30 million (€19 million) in annual military assistance, including equipment and training for many of the country's soldiers. Today Saakashvili's army consists of 30,000 men, and his military budget is 30 times as large as it was during the term of former President Shevardnadze. In July, 1,000 US soldiers and 600 Georgian infantrymen participated in an exercise dubbed "Immediate Response." The official objective was to prepare for deployment in Afghanistan, but the true goal was to fight Russian volunteers who, in case of a serious conflict, would come to the aid of the separatist regimes in Abkhazia and South Ossetia.

This is precisely what could happen now. On Friday evening, there were reports that the first Russian patriots were headed for South Ossetia -- at a time when the world was still puzzled over what could have prompted the Georgian president to launch his military strike.

Did he deploy his troops in the hope of receiving American support for regaining the two lost provinces before the end of US President Bush's term? And could he have miscalculated, not expecting his neighbor to the north to pull out its big guns so quickly?

The reintegration of South Ossetia and Abkhazia was Saakashvili's key campaign promise to Georgian voters. He also knows that his country can only succeed internationally by resolving its conflict with these provinces.

"It's not about Georgia anymore. It's about America, its values," the Georgian president told CNN in a live broadcast on Friday. "We are a freedom-loving nation that is right now under attack. "

But it doesn't appear that Saakashvili is entirely blameless in the matter.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,571079,00.html
JPTF 2008/08/10