GORI, Georgia – The debris of a defeated Georgian army, and quite possibly hopes of a solid NATO ally in the Caucasus, litters the road to Gori. And it just wasn’t supposed to be that way.
A drive up that surprisingly well-maintained roadway between the national capital of Tbilisi and the provincial seat where Soviet dictator Josef Stalin was born was, on the last day of the South Ossetia war, a surreal excursion. The same goes for the logic that seemingly drove Georgia into a full-fledged war against its giant neighbor Russia, a conflict that supposedly ended with a ceasefire agreement on Aug. 12. However, even after the truce was announced, news services were reporting Russian military incursions near Tblisi.
The geopolitical idea, for the Georgian government and its foreign friends, was that the former Soviet republic of Georgia would build a high-quality professional military along NATO lines, and trained by U.S. trainers to U.S. standards.
But Georgians abandoned Gori, a city of 37,000 residents, hastily and without a fight, as looming Russian tank columns rumbled from South Ossetia. The retreat, and at some points outright panic, showed the weaknesses of that optimistic plan. And on Aug. 12, dozens of abandoned Georgian military vehicles littered the road back to Tbilisi.
The Georgian army had of course for the previous four days been firing rocket barrages, and shoving troops north, in an attempt to push into the renegade province of South Ossetia and capture its capital, Tskhinvali.
The Georgian plan was to overwhelm the region with a concentration of U.S.schooled infantry backed up by bombardments delivered by NATOstandard Czechmanufactured heavy artillery.
Five of those hulking, selfpropelled and expensive howitzers on wheels, out of 24 bought from Prague and paid for by destitute Georgia’s tiny military budget, stood abandoned on the road to Gori. Hatches were open, passersby could inspect the fire control equipment inside and help themselves to military clothing and rations. One crew quit its vehicle in such a hurry that the antiaircraft machine gun was still mounted and free for the taking.
Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili’s calculation, now clearly faulty and the direct cause of the abandoned Czech artillery pieces, was that the Georgian army could swoop into the province and grab it before his opponents, and particularly the Russians, could react.
It might have worked too, but for a detachment of 588 Russian infantrymen stationed in South Ossetia as peacekeepers. Given Moscow’s longtime support of South Ossetia, they were also dug in and ready to fight hard if the Georgians ever came.
The Russians held, and that bought time for Colonel General Anatoliy Nogovitsyn, the gravelvoiced deputy head of Russia’s General Staff and Saakashvili’s opponent in the South Ossetia war, to launch a counteroffensive, first by air, then with tanks.
Russia lost between four and 14 jets in the war, depending on whose army was doing the counting, but in any case by the third day the Russian air force was ranging freely all over Georgia.
A common remark by Georgians moving along the road to and from Gori during the war, and discussing the Russian air force, was that the Russians “could see everything with their satellites,” and “can decide exactly what they hit.”
This was not strictly true, as the road to Gori shows. Just outside of the town are the remains of a Georgian armored personnel carrier demolished by a Russian fighter bomber, and right next to it a civilian Zhiguli car flattened by the blast.
Georgian soldiers retreating down the road from Gori on Aug. 11 told reporters one of the reasons they were pulling out was that they had few means to fight the Russian jets – quite in keeping with Georgia’s misguided NATOstyle training, which assumes a technicallyinferior opponent.
As a result, at the end of the road to Gori, throughout the South Ossetia war, Georgian soldiers and even average citizens have been nervous about any noise from the sky.
In Gori’s central square, where a Dutch reporter was killed either by strafing or a mortar barrage, depending on the eyewitness, the rumble of a Russian jet sent pedestrians for cover in doorways and under trees. Then the jet went about its business and the people in the square – Gori residents looking after their property and a few journalists – went their own ways. A smell of smoke hung in the air, as the Russians had been dropping bombs on a Georgian tank base nearby and sometimes they missed.
A reserve soldier who asked to be called Timur said he and his mates had been handed Kalashnikovs, stationed in Gori’s main square, and left without food, water or orders for two days. Russian fighter bombers strafed or bombed the tank base nearby from time to time, but sometimes the Russians aimed at the square and so, according to Timur, his entire war was listening for the sound of a jet and hiding as necessary.
When Timur and the rest of the Georgian army pulled out ahead of the advancing Russians, the retreat from Gori was chaotic, with soldiers running to jump onto the beds of new Toyota pickup trucks bought for army, and inexperienced drivers bogging armored vehicles in ditches.
About five kilometers from Gori, on the highway, are the hulks of two Russianmade lorries, one an Ural and the second a Zil, smashed into each other in a catastrophic frontend collision.
But perhaps most telling of all, at the end of the South Ossetian war, the Georgian army was nowhere to be seen. Not a checkpoint, not a guard post, not even a private with a rifle ready and willing to stop the Russians from driving their tanks to Georgia’s ancient capital of Tbilisi.
Saakashvili, hours after the ceasefire took effect, told Western reporters he was proud his Westernstyle army had maintained its “discipline and honor.” As part of a ceasefire agreement engineered with great fanfare by French President Nicolas Sarkozy, the Russian army was to stay out of Georgia and Gori, and the Georgian army was to return to its bases.
Less than 12 hours after that agreement, heralded by Western governments as the first step towards a peace in the Caucasus, a Russian army motor rifle unit, Chechnya veterans mostly, drove into Gori, in blithe violation of the ceasefire agreement, according to Czech and German reporters on the scene.
The best part of Georgia’s U.S.trained army, a brigade of some 2,000 men, was in Iraq when the South Ossetia war broke out. The Americans brought the brigade home on Air Force cargo planes, and by the secondtolast day of the war, that brigade of desert veterans was back home to protect the Georgian homeland.
Then Sarkozy’s ceasefire came and, like the rest of the Georgian army, the Iraq brigade went back to its bases. When the Russians came to Gori, per the terms of the ceasefire, there were no Georgians there to oppose them.
Stefan Korshak is a former Kyiv Post staff writer. This story is a version of an account run by the German Press Agency.
