TBLISI, Georgia (CNN) -- Russian television Friday showed a convoy of Russian tanks and said they were heading into the breakaway Georgian region of South Ossetia as escalating tensions over the region threatened to boil into full blown conflict.
The move came after Russia denounced as "aggressive" a Georgian troops military offensive to regain control over the province, vowing to respond.
Russian authorities earlier said several of its peacekeepers died in a Georgian attack in South Ossetia, which borders Russia and has strong ties to its vast northern neighbor, and they vowed not to leave Russian citizens in the territory unprotected.
"The Georgian leadership has launched a dirty adventure," a statement from Russia's Defense Ministry said on Friday. "We will not leave our peacekeepers and Russian citizens unprotected."
Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said Georgia started the fighting and warned that Russia would respond to their actions.
"Heavy weapons and artillery have been sent there, and tanks have been added. Deaths and injuries have been reported, including among Russian peacekeepers," Putin said in comments carried Friday by Russia's Interfax news agency. Watch more about the increased violence in Georgia »
"It's all very sad and alarming. And, of course, there will be a response."
Earlier Friday, Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili said in a televised statement that Russian aircraft bombed several Georgian villages and other civilian facilities.
He added that there were injuries and damage to buildings. "A full-scale aggression has been launched against Georgia," he said.
A Georgian official reported that seven people were hurt in the attack, the Associated Press said.
Saakashvili urged Russia to immediately stop bombing Georgian territory. "Georgia will not yield its territory or renounce its freedom," he said.
He also called for the full-scale mobilization of Georgian reserve forces as fighting continued to rage in South Ossetia's capital.
Meanwhile, NATO Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer issued a statement Friday saying he was seriously concerned about the recent events in the region, and called on "all sides to end armed clashes and begin direct talks."
The United States also urged all sides to bring an immediate end to the violence. "The U.S. has been in discussions for many months with all parties to find a peaceful resolution," White House spokesman Gordon Johndroe said.
"We urge all sides to refrain from violence and to begin direct talks."
Russian peacekeepers are in South Ossetia under a 1992 agreement by Russian, Georgian, and South Ossetian authorities to maintain what has been a fragile peace. The mixed peacekeeping force also includes Georgian and South Ossetian troops.
The latest events came just hours after the U.N. Security Council finished an emergency session to discuss a dramatic escalation of violence in Georgia and South Ossetia. The session ended Friday morning without a statement about the fighting.
Violence has been mounting in the region in recent days, with sporadic clashes between Georgian forces and South Ossetian separatists. South Ossetia declared its independence from Georgia in the early 1990s, but its independence is not internationally recognized.
Georgian troops launched new attacks in South Ossetia late Thursday after a top government official said a unilateral cease-fire offer was met with separatist artillery fire.
"The objective of the operation is to protect the civilian population, to ensure their security and then convince the separatists that there is not a military solution to this conflict," said Alexander Lomaia, the secretary of Georgia's National Security Council.
Lomaia said Georgian troops were responding proportionately to separatist mortar and artillery attacks on two villages -- attacks he said followed the cease-fire and call for negotiations by Saakashvili.
The official news agency of the South Ossetian government reported heavy shelling in the territory's capital, Tskhinvali, that left dozens of buildings ablaze.
About 2,000 Georgian troops attempted to storm Tskhinvali overnight and were regrouping south of the city, according to Russia's ITAR-TASS news agency.
Around 10 a.m. Friday, Georgia said Russian military aircraft violated Georgian airspace and dropped two bombs on Kareli, a part of Georgia that is about 50 miles northwest of the capital, Tblisi, and is not in the conflict zone, said Shota Utiashvili, spokesman for the Georgian Ministry of Interior.
Georgia, located on the Black Sea coast between Russia and Turkey, has been split by Russian-backed separatist movements in South Ossetia and another region, Abkhazia.
Georgian and South Ossetian negotiators had been scheduled to meet Friday in Tskhinvali, Moscow's chief negotiator, Yuri Popov, told the Russian news agency Interfax.
Saakashvili announced Thursday night that he had ordered his troops to cease fire while the negotiators met, but Lomaia said the call was met with more attacks.
In addition, Lomaia said, hundreds of "mercenaries" -- or "volunteers," as the South Ossetians described them -- are pouring across the border from Russia to join the fight.
The commander of a Russian peacekeeping mission has told Georgian officials that his troops are unable to control the situation, Lomaia said.
-- Journalist Elene Gotsadze contributed to this rep
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August 9, 2008 Russia Threatens Retaliation After Georgia Says It Fired on Planes By ANNE BARNARD and ANDREW KRAMER MOSCOW — The sharpest fighting since the early 1990s in the disputed Caucasian enclave of South Ossetia threatened to draw Russia and the American-backed former Soviet republic of Georgia into direct military conflict on Friday.
Georgian officials said their military had fired on Russian planes and that their aircraft had bombed a convoy of Russian tanks that moved into South Ossetia, the pro-Russian enclave that has enjoyed de facto autonomy from Georgia since 2004. A local Russian official said the convoy was humanitarian.
As Georgian forces besieged Tskhinvali, the capital of the enclave, President Dmitri A. Medvedev of Russia promised to "punish" those responsible for what he called "a deep violation of international law" by Georgia that he said had led to the deaths of Russian citizens and Russian peacekeepers stationed in Tskhinvali.
"I am obligated to defend the lives and dignity of Russian citizens, wherever they are located," he said in an address carried on Russian state television. "We will not allow the unpunished killing of our fellow citizens. Those who are guilty will suffer the punishment they deserve."
Speaking in Beijing, where he traveled to attend the opening of the Olympic Games, Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin of Russia said Georgia’s actions "will certainly lead to retaliatory actions.”
The fighting presented the most dangerous crisis in years in the Caucasus region, a key conduit for the flow of oil from the Caspian sea to world markets and an area where violent conflict has flared along the Russia’s outskirts for centuries, most recently in Chechnya.
The developments raised the question of how the United States might react to a Russian attack on Georgia, an American ally whose pursuit of NATO membership has angered the Russians.
By midday Friday, Georgian army units were trying to seize Tskhinvali using heavy machine guns and mortars in firefights with separatist paramilitary fighters, Shota Utiashvili, an official at the Interior Ministry of Georgia, said in an interview.
"Now, the army will have to take the capital,” he said, citing “massive fire” aimed at Georgian troops by fighters inside the city.
The head of a Russian peacekeeping force in the city, Marat M. Kulakhmetov, said in a telephone interview that the city had come under “massive attack” by the Georgians and that civilians had been wounded. As he spoke, shooting could be heard in the background.
Mr. Utiashvili, the Georgian official, said Georgians had seen Russian forces, including “hundreds of soldiers and dozens of armored vehicles, including tanks,” move up the military highway into the Caucasus Mountains that ties the separatist enclave to Russia.
By morning, they had passed through a mountain tunnel into the northern portion of the enclave, he said. "They are on Georgian territory now.”
"We don’t know whether they are militias or regular Russian forces," he said. "As they carry heavy equipment, we think they must be regulars. We don’t know. We just know they are coming to attack us."
He said Georgian Su-25 ground attack airplanes had struck the convoy and that the Georgians believed they had caused casualties and destroyed Russian armored vehicles.
But a spokesman for Teimuraz Mamsurov, the president of the semiautonomous Russian republic of North Ossetia, which borders the disputed territory, said the Georgian planes had struck an automobile convoy shipping humanitarian aid from Vladikavkaz to South Ossetia.
He said he had no information about the sighting of Russian tanks.
The Georgian military fired on Russian fighter jets that bombed Georgian territory and strafed Georgian positions at about 11 a.m. Moscow time, Mr. Utiashvili said.
Georgia’s president, Mikhail Saakashvili, ordered the “total mobilization” of military reserves, said Kaha Lomaia, Georgia’s national security adviser. He said about 70,000 troops would be mobilized, though not all would be immediately called up.
"They will be on high alert," he said.
Russian leaders at first sent mixed signals about their response. While Mr. Putin said immediately that Russia would retaliate, a spokesman for Mr. Medvedev said the president’s security council would hold an emergency meeting first to decide how to respond to the Georgian incursion.
The spokesman, Alexei Pavlov, declined in an interview to say whether Russia would respond with military force.
"There is a lot of information and it is very contradictory," he said. "Any word said in the wrong context could be ruinous for the peaceful and human resolution of this conflict." But the president appeared to have stiffened his response in his later televised address, promising punishment of Georgia.
The reported Georgian attacks were likely to be seen as a sharp provocation by Russia. But it also may have reason to tamp down the fighting to avoid chaos in a region not far from its Black Sea resort town of Sochi, where Russia will host the Winter Olympics in 2014.
Analysts said that Georgia could be trying to seize an opportune moment — with world leaders focused on the start of the 2008 Olympics in Beijing this week — to reclaim the territory.
Russia also may be seeking to draw attention away from another breakaway Georgian region, Abkhazia, where it has been under pressure to allow a settlement between pro-Russian and pro-Georgian factions, analysts said.
Meanwhile, Russian citizens in South Ossetia called on Russia to intervene, “We are being killed by Georgian aggressors,” they said in a letter posted on an official Web site maintained jointly by South Ossetia and North Ossetia, an adjacent territory on Russian territory that wants to unite with the southern region.
“We, hiding in the basement of a house, showered by bombs, are not feeling now that we are citizens of a great country. We hear Russia has a great air force and excellent planes. Protect your citizens. You are our last hope."
The Russian Defense Ministry said Friday afternoon that it would protect Russian citizens in the territory and Russian peacekeepers who came under fire in Tskhinvali.
“The Georgian leadership has unleashed a dirty adventure,” the ministry said in a statement, posted on its Web site. “The blood shed in South Ossetia will remain on the conscience of these people and their entourage. We will not allow anyone to do harm to our peacekeepers and citizens of the Russian Federation.”
Mr. Utiashvili, the Georgian Interior Ministry official, said that about 10 Russian jets dropped seven or eight bombs on Georgian territory outside South Ossetia. The jets struck a police station in Kareli and a radar station in Gori -- hitting two cities near the Georgian capital of Tblisi -- and wounded several people, he said.
It was unclear whether any Russian jets had been hit by Georgian forces.
Georgian casualties from Thursday totaled 10 dead and 50 wounded, he said. More were killed and wounded Friday morning but the military had not yet provided a tally. At least 25 people have been killed since fighting started Thursday, according to officials from both sides.
“We consider that to be an act of military aggression and we call on the Russian Federation to immediately stop military aggression against Georgia,” said Mr. Lomaia, the national security adviser.
Heikki Talvitie, special envoy for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe chairman-in-office, said Russian attempts to arrange a meeting between Georgian and South Ossetian authorities had failed on Thursday, but would continue today. The Georgian minister was unable to reach Tskhinvali yesterday, he said.
“We are very worried that this will escalate even further,” he said. “It will escalate very easily to a kind of a warfare and who controls this.”
He said it is essential that a meeting take place as soon as possible. “Now, as far as the situation is now, we still think it can be controlled by the parties. But if it escalates, who knows.”
Ambassador Talvitie said Tskhinvali has been partly evacuated, but the O.S.C.E. mission of five or six people remains active.
Nikolai Khalip and Ellen Barry contributed reporting.
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Joined: Sat Oct 16, 2004 11:54 pm Posts: 12287 Location: Manguetown Gender: Male
That will be interesting to wathc, more than the olympics...
_________________ There's just no mercy in your eyes There ain't no time to set things right And I'm afraid I've lost the fight I'm just a painful reminder Another day you leave behind
Joined: Thu Dec 16, 2004 1:54 am Posts: 7189 Location: CA
Russia willingly put itself in this situation. Its usually not very constructive to get in the middle of somone else's civil war.
According to NPR, Russia has bombed air defense targets within Georgia, relatively far from where the fighting is occuring in South Ossetia. How far are they going to go with this?
Another fun fact, South Ossetia has something like 100,000 inhabitants.
Joined: Sat Oct 16, 2004 11:54 pm Posts: 12287 Location: Manguetown Gender: Male
The Russians had a neat gimmick with this one. They granted Russian citizenship to most of the ethnic Russians in the disputed area. When these people then rebelled, the Russians were obligated to intervene with “peacekeepers” to protect their “citizens” from the violence.
_________________ There's just no mercy in your eyes There ain't no time to set things right And I'm afraid I've lost the fight I'm just a painful reminder Another day you leave behind
Joined: Thu Dec 16, 2004 1:54 am Posts: 7189 Location: CA
Human Bass wrote:
The Russians had a neat gimmick with this one. They granted Russian citizenship to most of the ethnic Russians in the disputed area. When these people then rebelled, the Russians were obligated to intervene with “peacekeepers” to protect their “citizens” from the violence.
Whats the likelihood that if this doesn't get too messy that maybe we'll see UN peacekeepers replace the Russians?
Joined: Thu Nov 25, 2004 3:00 pm Posts: 19826 Location: Alone in a corridor
rafa_garcia18 wrote:
LittleWing wrote:
I'm curious as to what Europe is gonna too (do?).
if i had to put money down, i'd say nothing that remotely resembles military action
I'm willing to put a lot of money on that. It's an even more explosive region than the Balkan. And why would Western-European countries go into that region? Just look at the map:
GORI, Georgia (AP) - Russia sent hundreds of tanks and troops into the separatist province of South Ossetia and bombed Georgian towns Saturday in a major escalation of the conflict that has left scores of civilians dead and wounded.
Georgia, a staunch U.S. ally, launched a major offensive Friday to retake control of breakaway South Ossetia. Russia, which has close ties to the province and posts peacekeepers there, responded by sending in armed convoys and military combat aircraft.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told reporters in Moscow that some 1,500 people have been killed, with the death toll rising Saturday.
The figure could not be independently confirmed, but witnesses who fled the fighting said hundreds of civilians had probably died. They said most of the provincial capital, Tskhinvali, was in ruins, with bodies lying everywhere.
The air and artillery bombardment left the provincial capital without water, food, electricity and gas. Horrified civilians crawled out of the basements into the streets as fighting eased, looking for supplies.
Russian Gen. Vladimir Boldyrev claimed in televised comments Saturday that Russian troops had driven Georgian forces out of the provincial capital. Witnesses confirmed that there was no sign of Georgian soldiers in the streets.
Georgia's President Mikhail Saakashvili proposed a cease-fire Saturday. As part of his proposal, Georgian troops were pulled out of Tskhinvali and had been ordered to stop responding to Russian shelling, said Alexander Lomaia, secretary of his Security Council.
Russia did not immediately respond to Saakashvili's proposal. Russian President Dmitry Medvedev had said earlier that Moscow sent troops into South Ossetia to force Georgia into a cease-fire.
Lomaia said there had been direct fighting between Russian and Georgian soldiers on the streets of Tskhinvali. He estimated that Russia sent 2,500 troops into Georgia. The Russian military has not said how many of its troops were deployed.
(that image is a lot more disturbing than I first noticed)
GORI, Georgia (AP) - Fighting raged in South Ossetia for a second day Saturday as Russia sent hundreds of tanks and troops into the separatist province and dropped bombs on Georgia that left scores of civilians dead or wounded.
Georgia, a staunch U.S. ally, launched a major offensive Friday to retake control of breakaway South Ossetia. Russia, which has close ties to the province and posts peacekeepers there, responded by sending in armed convoys and military combat aircraft.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told reporters in Moscow that some 1,500 people have been killed, with the death toll rising Saturday.
The figure could not be independently confirmed, but witnesses who fled the fighting said hundreds of civilians had probably died. They said most of the provincial capital, Tskhinvali, was in ruins, with bodies lying everywhere.
Russian military aircraft also raided the Georgian town of Gori on Saturday. An Associated Press reporter who visited Gori shortly after the bombing saw several apartment buildings in ruins, some still on fire, and scores of dead bodies and bloodied civilians. The elderly, women and children were among the victims.
It is the worst outbreak of hostilities since the province won de facto independence in a war against Georgia that ended in 1992.
The fighting threatens to ignite a wider war between Russia and Georgia, which accused Russia of bombing its towns, ports and air bases. Georgia, a former Soviet republic with ambitions of joining NATO, has asked the international community to help end what it called Russian aggression.
It also likely will increase tensions between Moscow and Washington, which Lavrov said should bear part of the blame for arming and training Georgian soldiers.
Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said Saturday that Moscow sent troops into South Ossetia to force Georgia into a cease-fire. Moscow has said it needs to protect its peacekeepers and civilians in South Ossetia, most of whom have been given Russian passports. Ethnic Ossetians live in the breakaway Georgian province and in the neighboring Russian province of North Ossetia.
Russian Gen. Vladimir Boldyrev claimed in televised comments Saturday that Russian troops had driven Georgian forces out of the capital of South Ossetia. But Georgian officials dismissed the Russian claims and insisted they were in control of Tskhinvali.
However, witnesses said separatist and Russian forces seemed to be in control of Tskhinvali center, with no Georgian troops visible Saturday morning.
The air and artillery bombardment left the provincial capital without water, food, electricity and gas. Horrified civilians crawled out of the basements into the streets as fighting eased, looking for supplies.
Overnight, Russian warplanes bombed the Vaziani military base on the outskirts of the Georgian capital and near the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline, Georgian Interior Ministry spokesman Shota Utiashvili said. He also said two other military bases were hit, and that warplanes bombed the Black Sea port city of Poti, which has a sizable oil shipment facility.
Georgia, meanwhile, said it has shot down 10 Russian planes, including four brought down Saturday, according to Kakha Lomaya, head of Georgia's Security Council.
And why would Western-European countries go into that region? Just look at the map:
Srsly. Why would anyone want to intervene to stop an escalating war between a fledgling democracy and a vengeful former superpower that cast a dark shadow over the continent for nearly a century? That would be wack.
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