Once again about the war

On August 8, 2011, many in Russia and Georgia will again remember August 8, 2008 from bitter memory. And again they will ask themselves the question: how could this happen at all and whether it will ever be possible to heal the wounds inflicted by that war. Personally, I don't think so. My grandmother, a native of Tbilisi, exactly three years ago, when the neighbors ran up to her shouting “Putin's planes are flying to bomb us!”, came down with a stroke, from which she never recovered. "And who started it first, who?" - a friend yelled at me in those days into the phone, who still cannot forgive Saakashvili for the fact that “because of him we lost Kikabidze”, who disappeared forever from Moscow posters. About “who started it first”, they argued for a long time. Each side had its own "truth". The Georgian "truth" was that Saakashvili would not have started if Russia had not provoked him to do so. The point in the dispute, at least on this specific point, was put by President Dmitry Medvedev, who recently spoke in an interview about what actually happened in Russian-Georgian relations before the war itself.
This is Medvedev's most powerful interview during his entire presidency. When politicians lie, they resort to wording; when they are sincere and tell the truth, they use words that everyone understands. Medvedev recalls: "We talked, talked, and as far as I remember, the last time we met was in Astana." There, Medvedev invited Saakashvili to come to Sochi and talk about all the problems, including Abkhazia and South Ossetia. “He (Saakashvili) said: “Good. I'm ready to do it." And disappeared. “After that, I checked for a month,” says Medvedev, “whether there is any information from our Georgian partner. She wasn't there." And after a visit to Tbilisi by the then US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Medvedev continues, “my colleague simply left the connection, he stopped communicating, stopped writing, stopped calling ... In all likelihood, new plans arose and they were implemented.” Then what about Saakashvili's statement in an interview that it was Medvedev who avoided him in Astana? Medvedev gives an answer that there is no reason not to trust: “He approached me (in Astana) several times. We talked with him, I remember it very well, sitting on the bus, walking in some park. And even more: “we went to drink tea in the evening and a glass of wine, and even there we sat with him on some kind of sofa and discussed how to meet.” Striking details. So, it was the Americans who pushed Saakashvili to storm Tskhinvali? No, Medvedev does not think so. Saakashvili, most likely, was sure that the Russians would not get into the war because of the Ossetians, and the Americans, in which case, would not abandon the Georgians. The sober calculation of a young Georgian wolf-technocrat, married to a Dutch woman, who studied in Ukraine and the USA, but never lived in Russia, turned out to be a fatal mistake. „

Now it is absolutely clear: Saakashvili could have avoided the war, but did not

” Medvedev, however, is not always logical. He assures that the task of changing the regime in Tbilisi was not set. But then he casually remarks: if Russian troops reached the Georgian capital, Georgia would most likely have a different president. They didn't get there because "it was I (Medvedev) who stopped the war," for which Saakashvili should thank him. So, after all, part of the Russian leadership had other plans, including the intention voiced by Putin to hang Saakashvili by the balls.
Now it is absolutely clear: Saakashvili could have avoided the war, but did not. Didn't do it because I didn't want to? “I can't, like him, say one thing, think another, and do a third,” Saakashvili once said of Putin. Maybe that's why he didn't talk to Medvedev about the world because he was preparing for war?
The irony of history, however, is that Saakashvili really has reason to be grateful to Medvedev. Going on an adventure in Tskhinvali, Saakashvili, in the words of Medvedev, "took and tore his country." But having lost the war, lost 20% of its territory and frozen all ties with Russia, Georgia in return has gained a strategic perspective, which only a country can have, finally throwing off its colonial chains and believing in itself. With Western money - yes, yes, with Western money, but with whose else, Russian, or what? “Poor Georgia continues today to carry out reforms that rich Russia, which won the August war, can only dream of.

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