Return of Russian Pride

The more I read the more I feel that Saakasvilli was just another neocon:


GORI, Georgia — The Russian officer surveyed his soldiers with a strong sense of satisfaction. They had easily occupied one of this tiny country’s largest military bases. American machine guns were stacked in rows. Flames licked at the walls of one barracks, built to NATO standards.
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Times Topics: Russia
Times Topics: Georgia
The officer had served in the Russian Army for 27 years. Ten of them after the Soviet Union fell had been sheer humiliation. Wages plunged. Officers sold tomatoes to survive.
“When Putin came, everything changed,” he said, referring to Vladimir V. Putin, formerly the president, now the prime minister. “We got some of our old strength back. People started to respect us again.”
The collapse of the Soviet Union was deeply painful for many Russians, perhaps most of all for its military. The sudden campaign that began last week seems to have restored a sense of confidence among its officers. It was not so much the background confrontation with the West as a stirring voice after years of decline: We are still here, the voice said, and we are powerful.
And while that may worry some — other countries in this small mountain region, for example — it felt good to officers here on Wednesday as they moved in their armored personnel carriers down empty roads in this largely military town.
Soldiers spoke of the Georgian president, Mikheil Saakashvili, in Tbilisi, the country’s capital, as having an outsize sense of his own importance. He put his military — fledgling and supported by the United States — up against theirs. It was no match.
“If that guy does not understand the situation, we’ll have to go farther,” said the officer, sitting under a tree near a column of tanks. “It’s just 60 kilometers to Tbilisi.”
By Tuesday, the Russian military had firmly occupied this leafy city, solidly in Georgian territory, on a day that diplomats in both countries agreed to a cease-fire. Tanks and armored personnel carriers roared through town. Dogs and old people watched.
Local commanders on the ground here said that the city was strategic and could be used for launching attacks into Southern Ossetia. They did not consider their presence a violation because they were not shooting, but guarding against a return of Georgian soldiers.
Locals, those who remained, told soldiers of their troubles, without much hope of their being resolved. A man wearing a necklace of wooden beads came to town to buy cigarettes and food, but could not make it back to his village, now blocked. A woman in a red housecoat wanted to know when the tanks would be gone and the electricity would come back. A pregnant woman about to have her baby was put in a car to Tbilisi.
According to Russian soldiers and officers in Gori, many of whom had come from Southern Ossetia, the battle started on Thursday night when Georgian troops outside the enclave’s capital city, Tskhinvali, began firing into the area from the hills nearby. The weapons, the soldiers and officers said, included a certain type of Katyusha rocket that Russians call grad, which means hail, for the way it unleashes shrapnel into its targets.
One officer, Mikhail, who, like others, asked that his full name not be published because he had not been given direct permission to talk with journalists, said that there were still bodies on the streets when he entered the city two days after the fighting began. Those accounts could not be independently confirmed.
Rumors of bands of thieves — their nationalities varied, depending on whom you talked to — were rife in Tbilisi and the area around Gori. Some were true. A group of Czech journalists waving their passports and looking frantic approached Russian soldiers on Wednesday saying they had just been robbed of their car and cameras by a man with a black bandanna tied on his head. More serious were the reports of ethnically motivated retaliatory attacks by Ossetians on Georgians.
One officer, who asked that his name not be used, said there had been a series of attacks on Wednesday on Georgian villages.
The city was almost completely empty and supplies were few and far between. One soldier drove to nearly every gas station in town looking for fuel oil. “Everyone ran away,” said a rail-thin man in a gray shirt with a wrinkled face, standing in front of a gas pump. (The soldier later found some in the Georgian military base, but learning its contents was a language lesson — they were listed in only Georgian and English.)
The soldiers were angry that the United States, which has supported Georgia, would have helped it in a conflict with Russia. How would the United States feel, they said, if Russia was suddenly lending military support to an American neighbor, like Mexico?
The soldiers wanted to show an American journalist around their newly claimed area, which happens to be the birthplace of Stalin. There was a quick trip to the Stalin museum (closed); and several chats with locals sitting on stoops.
There were darker moments. Two Georgian men, one of them with an ID card from the Georgian Ministry of Defense, were captured with their guns near the military base.
“Please let us go,” one of the men said, standing in front of the officer with his hands behind his head. “No,” he shot back. “So you can come back later and shoot my men?”
The Georgian man said: “How will I feed my family and kids?”
The officer said the men would be handed over to Russian authorities in Vladikavkaz, just across the border, and that they would probably be traded for Ossetian prisoners.
This military might worries neighboring countries. One official from Azerbaijan, who asked not to be named, said the ease of the military operation and lack of any substantive international response to it bode badly for his country, whose gas and oil flow through Georgia.
“People are angry at Saakashvili,” he said. “Russia dreamed for years for this chance, and he just handed them the opportunity.”