Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin (right)
Photo: Dmitry Azarov
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Mikheil Saakashvili Vetoed
// Russia suggests a regime change in Georgia
Russian-Georgia conflict has grown into Russian-American
Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has openly accused the United States of supporting Georgia. U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney has warned that “Russian aggression must not go unanswered.” At the same time, Washington accused Moscow of trying to overthrow the regime of Mikheil Saakashvili in Georgia. Kommersant has learned that Moscow is indeed pressing for the ouster of the Georgian president. The Russian Foreign Ministry has officially refused to carry on a dialog with him and, as Russian permanent representative to NATO Dmitry Rogozin told Kommersant, Moscow intends to demand that a special tribunal be set up, before which Saakashvili will stand as the chief defendant. The main peacekeeper should be France, as Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and French President Nicolas Sarkozy agreed in a telephone conversation yesterday. Sarkozy is expected to meet with Medvedev today and then fly to Tbilisi to talk to Saakashvili.
The basic positions of the presidents, which they discussed by telephone, were made known yesterday. Both Moscow and Tbilisi agree on the need to sign a ceasefire. (Saakashvili already did that yesterday in the presence of the foreign ministers of France and Finland.) There the agreement ends, however. Russia is officially demanding that Georgia withdraw its forces from the conflict zone, but it does not plan to withdraw its own. Tbilisi is insisting that the actions be symmetrical: both the Russians and the Georgians should go. And that’s not all.
In practice, Russia has an additional third demand. That is the removal of Saakashvili from office. Thus Sarkozy has either to convince the Georgian president to leave office or explain to the Kremlin why that is impossible. The Russian Foreign Ministry officially stated yesterday that it “does not want a regime change in Tbilisi,” but deputy head of the Foreign Ministry’s department of information and the press Boris Malakhov observed yesterday that “Saakashvili’s fate is in the hands of his own people.” The position Russian diplomats repeated in chorus yesterday was that there could be no negotiations with Saakashvili. “What decent person will talk to him now?” Russian Ambassador to the UN Vitaly Churkin asked. Russia’s NATO representative Rogozin told Kommersant that “no one wants to talk to [Saakashvili] now.”
The topic of regime change in Georgian was first raised at a session of the UN Security Council on Sunday. U.S. Ambassador to the UN Zalmay Khalilzad claimed then that Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that Russia’s main goal is to remove the regime in Tbilisi. “‘Regime change’ is an American term,” Russia’s chief diplomat observed. “Sometimes there are cases,” he continued, “when leaders become obstacles to a people’s way out of a situation. In those situations, some leaders make the brave decision in regards to their political future.” In other words, as Churkin implied, Saakashvili should leave office on his own.
A while later, Lavrov stated that Rice misunderstood him. Nonetheless, he still asserted that “a person who gives the order to commit war crimes, as a result of which thousands of Russian citizens, including peacekeepers, lost their lives, cannot be considered as a partner by Russia.” A source close to the Kremlin told Kommersant that Moscow considers the removal of Saakashvili a matter of principle, and that will be the main topic of conversation in today’s negotiations with Sarkozy.
Saakashvili told Western journalists yesterday that he too is convinced that Russia’s goal is to remove him from office. Moreover, he said, the war is being waged not over South Ossetia, but for control over energy resources. He was referring to the fact that the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline and the Baku-Tbilisi-Erzurum natural gas pipeline run through Georgia, bypassing Russia to export Caspian hydrocarbons to Europe.
Rogozin told Kommersant yesterday that a tribunal along the lines of one in The Hague has to be set up to pass judgment on the “aggression, war crimes and ethnic cleansing in South Ossetia.” He was echoed yesterday by Deputy Chief of the General Staff Anatoly Nogovitsyn, who also called Georgia’s actions “war crime.”
Rogozin admitted that it is not yet clear how that idea can be implemented technically, but, he said, he has photo and video material “enough for a whole library,” and he intends to present it at an emergency session of the Russia-NATO Council that is to take place today. Rogozin assured Kommersant that far from all NATO members intend to defend Saakashvili. “Many NATO countries are wincing from the bloodbath Georgia has created,” he said.
An emergency summit conference of the European Union is to go on at the same time in Brussels. Last Saturday, the presidents of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland issued a joint declaration calling on the international community to support Georgia. As Estonian President Toomas Hendrik Ilves stated yesterday that the EU should reverse its plans to ease visa requirements for Russians. Saakashvili also called on the EU to stop negotiations with Russia on partnership and cooperation.
They are using even harsher words in Washington. U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney, according to his press secretary, called Saakashvili Sunday evening and expressed U.S. solidarity with the Georgian people and its democratically elected government in the face of the threat to its sovereignty and territorial integrity. He has also stated that “the Russian aggression must not go unanswered.”
The U.S. Air Force has already helped the Georgian soldiers in Iraq return to Georgia, raising the ire of Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. “What’s amazing, of course, isn’t the cynicism,” he observed. “The scale of the cynicism is amazing, the ability to call black white and white black. The ability to so smoothly present the aggressor as the victim of aggression and lay responsibility for the consequences on the victims.” He further noted that “the Cold War mentality has firmly taken hold in the heads of some American diplomats” and described relations between the U.S. administration and Saakashvili by recalling a phrase ascribed to Franklin Delano Roosevelt: “Somoza is a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch, and we will help him and we will defend him.” Putin compared Saakashvili himself with Saddam Hussein. “Of course Saddam Hussein had to be hung for destroying some Shia villages. And the current Georgian rulers, who wiped ten Ossetian villages off the face of the Earth in an hour, of course they have to be protected,” he fumed.
Not all Western countries spoke so critically of Russia yesterday. In Western Europe, there was considerably more tolerance toward Russia. French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner called the U.S. one of the sides in the conflict and German government spokesman Thomas Steg stated that German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s plans to visit Sochi this week have not changed. Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini said that “It isn't possible to set up an anti-Russian European coalition and here we are close to Putin's position. But, he added, “Moscow needs understand that the peacekeeping task currently entrusted solely to its military needs be discussed with the international community.”
There are, nonetheless, clear signs of Russia’s isolation in the behavior of the European countries. The foreign relations heads of the Big Seven held a telephone conference yesterday on the problem of South Ossetia. British Minister of State for Europe Jim Murphy said that they discussed how to “maximize diplomatic pressure on Russia.”
Since the time that the G7 was transformed into the G8 with the inclusion of Russia, no political issue had been discussed by the group without Russia’s participation. The G7 gathered only to discuss financial matters and excluded Russia only because of its lower economic development. Now the Western countries have effectively excluded Russia from the G8 without any vote or official announcement. The Russian representative was simply not asked to join in on the telephone conference.
Murphy said of Russia’s actions in Georgia that it has “extended this in a highly unacceptable way.” He did not mention the international tribunal on South Ossetia that Russian has suggested.
Mikhail Zygar
All the Article in Russian as of Aug. 12, 2008
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