Russia: Saakashvili Said Trying to Grab Attention in Alleged Bombing Incident

Text of report by Vladimir Ivanov, Viktor Litovkin: “A Bomb for Saakasvhili” by Russian newspaper Nezavisimaya Gazeta on 8 August

A new row is flaring up between Georgia and Russia. The reason for this, as the Georgians see it, were intruder aircraft that flew from Russia. Two Su bombers, as Shota Khizanishvili, chief of staff of the Interior Ministry of Georgia, said, intruded in the early hours of 7 August (at 1800 hours on Monday, according to other information) into his country’s air space and fired off three air- to-surface missiles in the area of the village of Tsitelubani alongside the South Ossetian border.

The Georgian military and politicians have not thus far fashioned anything resembling a common position on what, for all that, happened there. They claimed on Tuesday morning that the village had been bombed by Su-27 fighters, then they began to say that these were Su-24s or Su-25s. It was either missiles or bombs that they employed. They claimed that the warhead weighed 700 kg or, in other words, almost a ton. But there was only 80 kg of explosive in it. True, the crater from the blast, which was shown on television and a photograph of which was posted on the Internet, in no way stretches to 700 kilograms – it is too small. In the first half of the day Vano Merabishvili, head of the Interior Ministry, maintained that the planes had come from Russia. The geographical address of the airfield from which the bombers had allegedly taken off – Mozdok (North Ossetia) – even appeared after midday on the Georgian law- enforcement department’s website.

But the Russian military categorically refuted this information. Aleksandr Drobyshevskiy, chief of the RF Air Force Public Relations Service, said that neither in the evening of 6 August nor in the morning of 7 August did Russian Air Force planes “make flights in this area and simply could not have violated the border of a contiguous state.”

Despite this, Vyacheslav Kovalenko, RF ambassador to Tbilisi, was yesterday summoned to the Georgian Foreign Ministry, where he was handed a protest note. The Russian ambassador said that he disagreed with the charges levelled at Russia. Meanwhile, the Georgian Interior Ministry announced that “radars precisely recorded an intrusion into Georgia’s air space from the Kazbegi direction.” The UN peacekeepers confirmed this. Eduard Kokoyty, leader of the unrecognized republic of South Ossetia, maintains that planes did, indeed, fly over the territory of his republic and even dropped a bomb, but that these were Georgian S-25 ground-attack aircraft. They are in service with the Georgian Air Force.

As a specialist on the Caucasus region explained to your NG columnist, “Russia has neither a reason nor the desire to somehow provoke Georgia. This makes no sense. Dropping some bombs on its peaceful villagers, Georgian shepherds, even less. Most likely Saakashvili, about whom the world has somewhat forgotten at this time, wants to give a reminder once again that his Sakartvelo is alive and continuing to ‘fight’ its powerful and very unfriendly neighbour – Russia. True, an absolutely absurd way, to be blunt, to give such a reminder has been chosen,” the expert showed his anger.

Former GRU officer Vitaliy Shlykov fully agrees with the anonymous expert. “Could something of the sort have happened, specialists would prefer to keep quiet about this,” he remarked. “The reliability of such information is very much in doubt. There’s simply no reason for our aviation to fly over Georgia with such powerful bombs. Russian pilots train on their own territory, in their own air space. Performing some manoeuvres in the skies of a neighbouring country under current conditions is simply impossible and pointless,” the member of the Council for Foreign and Defence Policy emphasized.

The political scientist Ivan Safronchuk [actually Safranchuk], director of the Moscow office of the US Centre for Defence Information, explained to your NG columnist that Russia’s policy in the Caucasus today is aimed at maintaining the current status quo in regard to territorial boundaries. “Georgia, though, on the contrary, is trying its utmost to disrupt it. It is opting for the most improbable ways of accomplishing its objectives. Whether or not a bomb fell on a Georgian village cannot be verified from Moscow. As, naturally, verification of this fact cannot be entrusted to the Russian military, which is allegedly to blame for this incident. But enlisting in this event some overseas inspector teams is for Tbilisi simply essential, this, in turn, could help it put on the agenda in international coordinates now all its territorial claims against Abkhazia and South Ossetia,” the expert said.

(c) 2007 BBC Monitoring Former Soviet Union. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.