Georgië gaat verder, maar oorlog 2008 is nog niet vergeten (en)

TBILISI - Four years after a war which shocked Europe, Georgia's EU ambassador has said that Russia is becoming "more dangerous."

The Georgian envoy, Salome Samadashvili, spoke to EUobserver on Thursday (9 August), after Russian President Vladimir Putin endorsed an inflammatory film about the conflict.

The YouTube video, entitled "Lost Day," shows former Russian military chiefs saying that Putin personally phoned the then Russian president, Dmitri Medvedev, from the Beijing Olympics on 8 August 2008 to tell him to invade Georgia.

Putin on Wednesday told Russian media that he drew up detailed plans for the invasion two years in advance.

"It's within the framework of this plan that the Russian side acted. It was prepared by the general staff at the end of 2006 or the beginning of 2007. It was approved by me, agreed with me," he said.

He added that Russian soldiers - who were stationed in Georgia's breakaway region of South Ossetia as "peacekeepers" - trained and armed local paramilitaries as part of the plan.

"Our military specialists believed they could not provide assistance in a clash of regular armies, but they turned out to be much needed," he noted.

For some analysts, the revelations are designed to make Medvedev look weak in order to remove him from Russian politics.

For Georgia's EU ambassador, they show the Union should pay more attention to Georgia's warnings that Russia is still a threat.

"The current Russian government is ... becoming more and more disdainful of the EU's opinion and openly shedding any pretence of respect for international law. Therefore, they are [becoming] even more dangerous to neighbours like us," Samadashvili told this website.

She noted that Russia is to hold military exercises in North Ossetia, South Ossetia and in Abkhazia, another breakaway Georgian region, in October, at the same time as Georgian elections.

"The statement made by Putin taken in the current context - its ongoing occupation [of Abkhazia and South Ossetia], the military exercise, its continuous attempt to destabilise our country - are a thinly veiled threat, an encouragement for those who have committed ethnic cleansing against Georgian citizens."

For his part, Georgian foreign minister Grigol Vashadze said in an op-ed for this website that the EU should urge Moscow to withdraw troops from occupied territories.

Georgian dreams

The 2008 war damaged Georgian President Mikheil Sakaashvili's international reputation.

An EU-mandated report published in 2009 blamed him, in part, for shooting first at South Ossetian irregulars in an act which triggered the Russian response.

Meanwhile, the Georgian opposition - the "Dream Coalition," a political movement bankrolled by Georgian billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili - is spreading news in the EU capital that Sakaashvili is corrupt and undemocratic.

The group recently hired a top PR agency in Brussels, Burson-Masrteller, to help arrange interviews with media.

Georgia's Samadashvili said Putin's comments shed new light on the 2009 war report.

She noted that Russian training of Ossetian paramilitaries and Putin's 2006 premeditation of the war belie its line that Russia attacked Georgia because Sakaashvili fired first.

"Clearly, after everything else failed to remove a pro-Western government from power, they moved to the measure of last resort - full scale invasion," the ambassador said.

She added that Ivanishvili's PR campaign is having limited results.

"Debate on Georgia in the European Parliament during the last session clearly demonstrated the failure of the lobbying groups to hijack the non-biased and objective discussion on the state of democracy in my country," she said.