Putin's Act of War in Georgia
Filed under: Georgia
On May 26th, the United Nations did something it very rarely does. It took a stand.
When that happens you know that some country has been caught dead to rights doing something so outrageous that even the cowardly bureaucrats at the UN were compelled to speak out against it.
No country in the world is better at committing acts that outrageous than Russia is.
In its May 26th report, after a formal investigation, the UN concluded that Russia had committed an act of war against Georgia when it shot down a Georgian reconnaissance aircraft as it flew over Georgian airspace last month in the country's breakaway province of Abkhazia. Russian then lied about doing so, in a typically cowardly and duplicitous manner. There's no other way to characterize this outrageous action: It's an act of war.
As Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili stated: "The UN has released a report in which Russia is directly accused of aggression against Georgia. For the first time, the UN has directly pointed the finger at Russia."
Think Russia might have reconsidered its actions in light of this? Think Russia might have asked itself whether it was a good idea to establish a precedent like this, under which NATO would be perfectly free to take such actions in Russia's own breakaway provinces like Chechnya and Ingushetia?
If you did, you thought wrong. Russia has only become more aggressive.
Over the weekend, American diplomats expressed outrage as Russia announced its intention to actually invade sovereign Georgian territory (the UN report confirmed this). The U.S. State Department declared: "The United States is dismayed by Russia's Defense Ministry announcement on May 31 that it intends to send more military forces, including railroad construction troops, into the Georgian region of Abkhazia without the consent of the Georgian government."
Knowing Russia as I do, I don't dare imagine how violently they would react if NATO announced its intention to send platoons of "railroad construction troops" into Chechnya or Ingushetia. Yet, Russians have no hesitation in taking these actions in regard to its tiny neighbor to the south.
Georgia has repeatedly warned that Russia is clearly attempting to annex portions of its territory (even though Russia already controls more territory than any other nation in the world), and it is time for NATO and indeed the UN itself to take a stand. If Russian imperialism isn't stopped in Georgia today, it will spread just as surely as did Hitler's in Europe tomorrow.
Words simply fail when one attempts to discuss the level of hypocrisy required for Vladimir Putin, a proud KGB spy, to rail against U.S. militarism one moment and then conduct his own brand of it the next. What we see before us is a neo-Soviet Russia hellbent on repeating all the mistakes of its failed past, for reasons that can only be understood by Russians themselves.
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