Non-Star Wars

Combat losses and gains by belligerents

Why did the Georgian troops withdraw from the battle so quickly? When did the Russian army begin preparations for the invasion, and is everything so right in it? The New Times tried to figure it out

In the post-Soviet space, in terms of the quality of training, the Georgian army was considered perhaps the best. For the past four years, it has been actively rebuilt to NATO standards under the guidance of American instructors, equipping and equipping it to a decent level. All this evaporated on August 8–12, 2008. The Georgian troops did not defend Gori, opening, in fact, the road to Tbilisi for the Russian troops, gave up the Kodori Gorge, Western Georgia, without a fight, and allowed the Russians to enter Poti. The Russian army got huge warehouses of weapons.

ordered to survive

Sources in the Georgian military department claim that the artillerymen showed themselves best of all, conducting such accurate and concentrated fire (this is also confirmed by the authoritative military publication Jane's Defense Weekly), that they managed to delay the approach of the main Russian forces to Tskhinvali for a long time. The rest of the offensive was classic and armored vehicles, attacking with the support of motorized rifles, suffered heavy losses. After the battles near Tskhinvali, the troops were ordered to retreat to Tbilisi without engaging in battle with the Russian units. That is why they abandoned military property - there was no time left to take it out or destroy it. It was considered inexpedient to create a defensive line between Gori and Tbilisi with the complete air supremacy of Russian aviation. They saw no reason to dissipate their forces, putting up resistance also in Western Georgia. Why didn't a certain qualitative military-technical superiority of the Georgian troops make an impact? Answer from Tbilisi: “It is impossible to create a combat-ready army out of nothing in just four years. And how could a small country resist the colossus? The dominance in the air and the quantitative superiority of Russia in artillery and armored vehicles, which were concentrated into a fist, had an effect. The blow from Abkhazia hammered the last nail: we don’t have the strength to fight on two fronts.”

However, the strangeness of the Tskhinvali operation itself caught my eye: having committed a massacre in the city, the Georgian military leaders “forgot” about the Roki tunnel. And they did not even try to seal the southern portal of the tunnel in advance with rocket and bomb strikes from the air, capture it with a helicopter landing or undermine it with the help of sabotage groups. Yes, even if at the same time they lost all Georgian aviation (ten Su-25 attack aircraft) and put down the entire special forces, it would be justified from a military point of view: the goal - intercepting the only communication line of South Ossetians with the "mainland" - was worth it, because immediately would decide the outcome of the war. A clear answer to the "rock question" could not be obtained. Although the source of The New Times at the headquarters of the peacekeeping forces claims that the Georgian planners of the operation expected to clog the tunnel after the majority of Ossetian refugees pass through it to Russia, “and refugees, as practice shows, have practically no chance of returning back.”

But most importantly, the Georgian army was not structurally designed for a collision with the Russian one: it was built for blitz operations against the enemy without aviation and air defense. Hence the distortions, for example, during the construction of the Air Force - the emphasis was on attack aircraft, in fact they did not create military air defense, and the country's air defense existed only theoretically. The refusal to create a costly air defense system is a conscious choice of Tbilisi, which has staked on the speedy entry into NATO: there, within the framework of the division of labor, others would take care of Georgia's air defense, as was the case in the Baltics. According to Jane's Defense Weekly, there was no coordination of air defense units at all, they were never integrated into a single electronic network and communication was carried out using conventional telephones and walkie-talkie radio transmitters. ¹ “If the Georgians even had a small fighter group instead of the Su-25,” a source from the Main Staff of the Russian Air Force confirmed to The New Times, “this would change the situation in the air dramatically, and we already acted to the limit of our capabilities.”

Hidden losses

The Russian side officially acknowledged the loss of only four aircraft: three Su-25 attack aircraft and one Tu-22 long-range bomber. At the same time, the Tu-22 and its crew did not belong to the combat unit, but to the 929th Main Flight Test Center (GL TC) named after V.P. Chkalov MO RF. The names of three pilots were announced: Colonel Igor Zinov, Major Vyacheslav Malkov and Colonel Igor Rzhavitin. The first two were captured (after the exchange on August 19 they returned to their own), the name Rzhavitin was on the helmet of the deceased aviator. But in an interview with the Ukrainian TV channel Inter, Colonel Zinov clearly said that he was not the commander of the Tu22 at all, but of the Su-24 front-line bomber. The navigator of the same Su-24, most likely, was Colonel Igor Rzhavitin. There are no Su-24s among the recognized losses, and the downed pilot and, apparently, the dead navigator of this machine are available! This means that the Russian Defense Ministry is hiding the death of at least one more aircraft. Four lost cars for such a conflict is already a lot, and five is excessive. Moreover, the two crews are test pilots of the GL ITs, the elite of the Air Force, and using them on the battlefield instead of pilots of combat units is simply nonsense. The corresponding order could only be given by the Commander-in-Chief of the Air Force, Colonel-General Alexander Zelin, and obviously out of desperation - the quality of training of the flight personnel of combat units is catastrophically low.

Managerial Chaos

Russian troops entered South Ossetia powerfully, but chaotically, not in soldered units and formations, but in scattered units. The result was a vinaigrette of battalion groups that interacted weakly with each other, especially since they had means of communication from the time of Tsar Peas. The Global Navigation Satellite System (GLONASS), the domestic analogue of GPS, simply did not work. It is pointless to make claims to the Space Forces: they do what they can, the shortage of satellites is their old headache ...

Sources of The New Times in the Ministry of Defense claim that the personnel reshuffling of the last two months has made a decisive contribution to the insufficient preparedness of the operation. “What competent planning, what organization of interaction,” an employee of one of the departments of the General Staff was indignant, “if personnel changes in the Moscow Region paralyzed work ?!” The key figure in the system is the Chief of the General Staff, General Nikolai Makarov, who had not previously served in the General Staff, and only took over as head of the General Staff on June 3, 2008. Two months to master such a complex organism is extremely short. In late June - early July 2008, key figures of the General Staff were fired - the head of the Main Operational Directorate (GOU) and the head of communications of the Armed Forces. GOU is just the planning of military operations.

On the same days, Colonel-General Anatoly Nogovitsyn was transferred to the General Staff from the Air Force Command, and on August 4, 2008 (four days before the start of the operation!) They unexpectedly replaced the Commander-in-Chief of the Ground Forces Nikolai Maslov with General Vladimir Boldyrev (before that, he headed the Volga-Ural Military District ). It is very likely that both the Chief of the General Staff, and the Commander of the North Caucasian Military District, and the Commander-in-Chief of the Ground Forces were changed under the “Georgian campaign”.

Difficult to study

It turns out that the operation was either planned by some people, and already implemented by others who do not have the proper experience in organizing such large-scale operations, or the plan was literally developed on the knee by new personnel. The latter is doubtful: the chronicle of the concentration of troops and their combat deployment is visible even from the official reports of the Russian Defense Ministry.

For example, the aviators, it seems, already in May - early June, they knew for sure that a war was coming soon, and therefore they hastily restored their skills in operations in the mountains. Railway workers in Abkhazia were paving the way for the transfer of troops. Under the cover of exercises, the field hospital "hung" in a convenient place right on the eve of the war. And the transfer of troops, the development of their interaction, the concentration of forces and the combat deployment of the group, as is already obvious, were carried out under the cover of the Kavkaz-2008 exercises: it is simply unrealistic to concentrate such a quantity of military equipment imperceptibly. Then this technique was "delayed" - until the day when it was needed. This, according to our interlocutor, a tank colonel, partly explains the numerous breakdowns and failures of armored vehicles on the march to South Ossetia: both the depreciation of the equipment and the previous four weeks of its intensive operation in the field without proper care affected.

Judging by open data, by August 5, the combat deployment of the grouping and the corresponding infrastructure was completed: logistic and technical support points, as well as points for refueling with fuel and lubricants. ² Whether everything was planned specifically for August 7-8 is not known for sure; it is impossible to keep the deployed grouping for a long time. Although it cannot be ruled out that the deadlines were still a little later: this is indirectly evidenced by the hasty recall of a number of military leaders from vacation. And it was very important that Saakashvili be the first to start, believing that Russia would not rush, and "foreign countries would help us." But it turned out the way it happened: the elements, eager to fight, collided - the strongest won.

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¹ Jane's Defense Weekly, August 15, 2008.

² Website of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation, messages from the information and public relations service of the North Caucasus Military District, August 2, 2008.