An Anti-Russia Campaign

By Stephanie Findlay - Thursday, July 29, 2010 at 4:20 PM - 57 Comments

David Mdzinarishvili/Reuters

When the new school year starts, Georgian students will receive a new history textbook chronicling 200 years of Russian occupation. The textbook is the result of a special commission created by Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili to examine the shared history of the two countries. Russians are not impressed. “Where is the logic?” asked Vladimir Medinsky, Russia’s chairman of information policy during an interview with Russian newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda. “Do they really want to raise a generation that will consider Russia a monster?”

The textbook is but one example of Saakashvili’s anti-Russia campaign, which he has been running since being elected to power in 2004. He seems determined to purge Georgia of anything Russian or Soviet. Last June, in the town of Gori, the birthplace of Joseph Stalin, Georgian authorities removed a historic six-metre monument of the Soviet leader from the central square where it had been standing for 48 years. The intention was to replace it with a memorial “to the victims of the Soviet dictatorship, victims of Stalin’s policies inside and outside Georgia, and victims of the 2008 war,” said Georgian Culture Minister Nikoloz Rurua.

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Who’s to Blame?

By Nicholas Kohler with Aaron Wherry and Nancy Macdonald - Wednesday, February 24, 2010 at 3:55 PM - 7 Comments

Gregory Carigiet, a 22-year-old psychiatric nursing student from the Swiss canton of Grison, is an awfully good luger. Ranked 19th in the world this season, he was well ahead of 21-year-old Nodar Kumaritashvili, the Georgian ranked 44th whose gruesome death during an Olympic training run last Friday focused so much attention on a sport—luge—that remains relatively obscure in North America. Yet the fact that Kumaritashvili made it to the Olympics, where he would have raced on the fastest and therefore arguably the most dangerous track in the world, while Carigiet did not, worries many in the sport. It suggests a deadly flaw in the way athletes are selected to compete on high-performance tracks.

“Georgia was—the irony is—lucky to qualify for the Games,” Wolfgang Staudinger, Canada’s luge coach, told Maclean’s. Thanks to an esoteric wrinkle in Switzerland’s Olympic qualifying process, Carigiet did not make his country’s cut for the men’s event, meant to gather the top 40 international sliders for competition at the Whistler Sliding Centre, which hits racers hard with a vertical drop of 152 m and can catapult them to record speeds of 153 km/h. “They left him at home,” says Staudinger. “That opened a spot in the top-40 field, and whoever was next—41st, 42nd and so on—basically, they moved up.”

Kumaritashvili benefited from a number of such top-40 omissions, permitting him a place in an elite group many believe he had no business competing in. And so, two hours before he was scheduled to board the bus for the opening ceremonies in Vancouver, he was on a training run at speeds exceeding 140 km/h when he made an error exiting turn 15. Slammed by the curve’s massive G-force, he attempted to compensate but flipped over, ricocheted off the track wall, and flew headfirst into a support pillar. It was the first fatal crash in luge competition in 35 years and the first Olympic death since 1992, when Swiss skier Nicolas Bochatay died on a training run in Albertville, France.

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Is France’s sale of warships to Russia really a good idea?

By Michael Petrou - Saturday, February 20, 2010 at 9:42 PM - 25 Comments

The 2008 war between Russia and Georgia was brought to a supposed end with a peace deal brokered by French President Nicolas Sarkozy. Russian President Dmitry Medvedev signed the agreement, which called for the withdrawal of Russian troops from Georgian territory, and promptly ignored it. Russian soldiers remained in Georgia for two months, and are still stationed in South Ossetia and Abkhazia, which most of the world recognizes as part of Georgia but which Russia declared to be independent states—another violation of the agreement.

Russia’s actions were a clear slap in the face to France. As Sarkozy himself pointed out, his signature was also on the document. And yet today, less than two years later, France has agreed to sell Russia as many as four Mistral amphibious assault ships—massive and technologically sophisticated vessels that can each transport and deploy 16 helicopters, four landing barges, 70 vehicles including 13 tanks, and more than 400 soldiers. They also include a hospital and can be used as amphibious command platforms. “A ship like that would have allowed the Black Sea fleet to accomplish its mission in 40 minutes, not 26 hours, which is how long it took us,” Russian naval commander Vladimir Vysotsky boasted, referring to the 2008 conflict.

The money that each $750-million boat will bring to France’s underused shipyards likely helped Sarkozy get over the Georgian war snub. But France is also a member of the NATO military alliance, which in April 2008 predicted Georgia and Ukraine would one day join it. The impending sale also coincides with the release of Russia’s latest military doctrine, which identified NATO’s eastward expansion as the main external military danger facing Russia.

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'All Canadians were deeply saddened'

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, February 12, 2010 at 11:02 PM - 4 Comments

A statement from the Prime Minister on the passing of Nodar Kumaritashvili.

“All Canadians were deeply saddened to learn of the tragic death of Georgian Olympic team member Nodar Kumaritashvili following a luge training accident in Whistler today.  His competitive spirit and dedication to sports excellence will be remembered and honoured during the Games.

“On behalf of all Canadians, Laureen and I send our deepest sympathies to Mr. Kumaritashvili’s family and friends and the entire Georgian Winter Olympic team.”

Georgia team: 'They will compete, and dedicate their performance to their fallen comrade'

By Nancy Macdonald - Friday, February 12, 2010 at 8:45 PM - 3 Comments

Georgian athletes will remain in B.C., according to the country’s sport minister, Nikolos Rurua; earlier in the day, there had been speculation that the country might pull out of the Vancouver Games following the tragic death of 21-year-old Georgian luger, Nodar Kumaritashvili, today, in Whistler.

During the Beijing Olympics in 2008, Georgia was invaded by Russia, Rurua noted. “Our team, despite that fact, persevered.” In Vancouver, he said, “our sportsmen and athletes decided to be loyal to the spirit of Olympic Games.”

Questions about Kumaritashvili’s experience were “unfair,” and “misleading,” Rurua said; he stressed that Nodar was a “very promising” and “well-qualified,” athlete, and came from the resort town of Borjomi —“a place in Georgia with a long snowsports tradition.”

Rurua was asked questions about track safety and—from a British reporter—whether, in the lead-up to the Games, his athletes had been given sufficient time to train, like the “Canadian athletes.”

Rurua said that the team, including Kumaritashvili had arrived in B.C. a month earlier, and that Kumaritashvili had been granted access to the track but didn’t know how many runs he had taken.

Georgia’s athletes will wear black bands at tonight’s Opening Ceremonies; there is speculation that the Georgian delegation may be called to enter BC Place last—a position of honour traditionally reserved for the host country.

Death raises questions about luge track, Canadian competitiveness

By Nancy Macdonald - Friday, February 12, 2010 at 4:21 PM - 72 Comments

A collective cry went out at the Main Media Centre this morning when video featuring the horrific crash of Georgian luger, Nodar Kumaritashvili was broadcast into the main hall. The 21-year-old racer died at the Whistler Sliding Centre — following his second crash in just two days. His death cast an immediate pall over Vancouver, where the opening ceremonies are set to begin in just two hours.

Both International Olympic Committee president Jacques Rogge and John Furlong, chief executive of the Vancouver Organizing Committee addressed reporters this afternoon. Both donned black suits and black ties and appeared visibly shaken by the day’s event.

“This is a very sad day,” said Rogge. “The IOC is in deep mourning. Here you have a young athlete who lost his life pursuing his passion.”

“We are heartbroken beyond words,” said Furlong. “The accident is tragic. It will be investigated and when we know the results you will be informed.”

Even before the accident, questions about the “exceedingly dangerous,” 1,450-m-long course — the fastest on earth — were being raised. The top speed reached at the track at Fitzsimmon’s Creek, on Blackcomb Mountain is 153.93 kph. Kumaritashvili was believed to have been travelling at 143.3 kph.

In training runs Thursday, both Guntis Rekis of Latvia and Stefan Hoehner of Germany had high-speed crashes. “My goals are to stay alive, not break bones,” Rekis told reporters. “I was scared a bit.”

“I think they are pushing it a little too much,” Australia’s Hannah Campbell-Pegg said Thursday night after she nearly lost control in training. “To what extent are we just little lemmings that they just throw down a track and we’re crash-test dummies? I mean, this is our lives.”

“I’ve never slid that fast,” Maya Pedersen, a Swiss gold-medallist told Maclean’s last February.

Although both the international luge and bobsleigh federations declared the track safe and Games-ready a year ago, the International Luge Federation (FIL) president Josef Fendt of Germany told reporters that the sporting body wanted less-experienced, and less-talented lugers to have more training time at the WSC prior to the Vancouver Games. Fendt also said the protective devices near the track’s curb were too short, and needed to be lengthened so athletes were protected from flying from the track.

Questions will likely also be raised about Canada’s aggressive pursuit of the home ice advantage in Vancouver and Whistler.

Earlier this week, Andy Schmid, the performance director of British Skeleton called the Canadian decision to limit practice time for overseas competitors (compared to the more than 300 runs set aside for Canadian athletes) as irresponsible. “Please, let there be no accidents there because that could kill the sport,” he told Britain’s Telegraph.

“People have the argument that it’s just home advantage and that’s normal for an Olympic host country, but it’s different for sports involving high speed. Can you imagine in Formula One nobody being allowed on a track because somebody has home advantage?”

No one yet knows how the crash will affect tonight’s Opening Ceremonies at BC Place, or the luge event itself, set to begin Saturday, with the men’s singles. Luge training at Whistler has been suspended.

Everything a minister needs to know about Cuba, NATO and Pamela Anderson

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, September 23, 2009 at 10:49 AM - 14 Comments

Still more on what precisely was in Maxime Bernier’s misplaced binder.

Given the importance of the topic during the Bucharest summit, it should come as no surprise that many of the briefing notes dealt with extending membership to Ukraine, Georgia, Croatia, Albania, Macedonia and even Bosnia-Herzegovina.

The government’s strong support for Ukrainian membership is reiterated several times…

Canadian views on Georgia’s hopes to join the alliance, however, were markedly less effusive. While generally supportive, and noting high public support within Georgia for NATO accession, the briefing notes raised some concerns.

Sorry, Georgia.

This time, Georgia gets the blame

By Katie Engelhart - Thursday, August 27, 2009 at 6:00 PM - 2 Comments

It’s a classic case of whodunit. Everyone can agree that there was a war in South Ossetia a year ago, but no one can agree on who started it. Russia says that Georgia attacked the disputed area within the former Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic, while Georgia says that it was responding to invading Russians. Surprisingly, this time around it looks like global opinion will favour the Russian version of events.

A number of news sources speculate that a European Union report to be released in September will place most of the blame for the August 2008 conflict on Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili. So Saakashvili has issued a pre-emptive strike: a 190-page counter-report concluding that Russia “launched a large-scale assault on Georgia,” which necessitated a response. Continue…

Georgia: spreading democracy… to Georgia

By Paul Wells - Thursday, April 9, 2009 at 9:14 AM - 1 Comment

I’m on a train from wi-fi hell so I can’t fill this posts with all the links to today’s news accounts that I’d like, but suffice it to say that the occasional mass protest against Mikheil Saakashvili is underway in Tbilisi, Georgia. When I was in Tbilisi to cover the last presidential election, shortly after the last round of mass protests, at the end of 2007, the Saakashvili regime sent Nino Burjanadze, the Parliamentary speaker and acting interim president, to talk to me and defend Saakashvili. This time she’ll be one of the protest ringleaders. This is the story of Saakashvili’s term in power: he is good at losing friends. Here’s an interview with Burjanadze (I’m quite sure, indeed have read elsewhere, that her supporters have been beaten, not “bitten;” you run into that sort of problem when an Armenian interviews a Georgian).

Georgia/Russia: Here's a thought — could we please not give psychopaths an express ticket into NATO?

By Paul Wells - Wednesday, November 26, 2008 at 1:23 PM - 18 Comments

Today Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk will receive a report from Polish intelligence about Sunday’s incident near a checkpoint between South Ossetia and Georgia proper, at which gunshots were apparently fired at (or near) vehicles containing the presidents of Georgia and Poland.

As some of the commenters here noted when I wrote about it on Sunday, this could not be more serious. Poland is a NATO member country. A strict reading (unrealistically strict, but still) of Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty would regard an armed attack against Poland’s president as an act of war requiring collective — including Canadian — response.

Here’s where things get interesting. The Polish intelligence report asserts that the gunshots were fired by Georgian troops and the whole thing was a Georgian put-up job.

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Georgia/Russia: The industrious Ms. Rice

By Paul Wells - Wednesday, November 26, 2008 at 12:35 PM - 10 Comments

Reuters:

Kitsmarishvili, who had been recalled from Moscow weeks before the war, said Georgian leaders had mistakenly convinced themselves that the assault had the support of U.S. President George W. Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

“Some people who attended the meeting between Condoleezza Rice and Saakashvili (in July 2008) were saying that Condoleezza Rice gave the green light for military action,” he told a news conference.

Herald-Tribune:

The United States has started a diplomatic offensive among NATO capitals in Europe, urging top diplomats to offer Georgia and Ukraine membership to the alliance without first fulfilling requirements under the Membership Action Plan, the process that sets out the criteria and conditions for eventually joining the military pact, according to NATO diplomats.

In an unexpected new initiative, Condoleezza Rice, the U.S. secretary of state, has already held lengthy telephone conversations with French and German and other senior envoys, asking them to discard the Membership Action Plan, added the diplomats.

Georgia/Russia: What I like is how helpful everyone is trying to be

By Paul Wells - Sunday, November 23, 2008 at 1:36 PM - 6 Comments

Shots fired at (near?) presidents of Georgia and Poland in (near?) (not so near?) South Ossetia.

Georgia/Russia: On building a strong alliance

By Paul Wells - Thursday, November 20, 2008 at 11:23 PM - 4 Comments

Nicholas Kristof’s column in Thursday’s New York Times contained one major surprise for me: the reference to Nino Burjanadze as a critic of the country’s president, Mikheil Saakashvili.

“It was possible to avoid this war,” said Nino Burjanadze, a former close ally of Misha who last month formed an opposition party to challenge him. “Because of miscalculation, my country was involved in a war it was clear that it would lose.”

This comes as a not inconsiderable surprise because I interviewed Burjanadze in her office in Tbilisi 11 months ago, when she was acting president and apologist-in-chief for Saakashvili. Continue…

Dmitry Medvedev out-poops our puffins

By Michael Petrou - Friday, September 12, 2008 at 12:29 PM - 0 Comments

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev says Georgia’s invasion of South Ossetia was his country’s equivalent of September 11. He also likens Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili to a “pooch” and describes him as an “unpredictable, pathological and mentally unstable drug abuser.” This guy’s all class.

Poland: uncertainty

By Paul Wells - Tuesday, September 9, 2008 at 1:20 PM - 11 Comments

From a poll published today by an excellent Polish foreign-relations think tank. It says 77% believe Russia will eventually pose a military threat to Poland, up significantly from before the Georgia unpleasantness. So this is not an ethereal, hypothetical threat to Poles. But how do they like the U.S. missile-defence agreement that the Poles and Americans signed as soon as that conflict broke out? Mixed feelings:

Ethnic cleansing in Georgia

By Michael Petrou - Friday, August 29, 2008 at 4:22 PM - 0 Comments

Human Rights Watch released a report  today that reveals the widespread burning and looting of ethnic Georgian villages in South Ossetia.

Human Rights Watch researchers witnessed the looting by Ossetian militias. They also spoke with several members of these militias who admitted their objective was to ensure the Georgians had no homes to return to – in other words, to ethnically cleanse the region of Georgians. These attacks took place in areas under the control of the Russian army. Most of the destroyed homes have their exterior walls intact, indicating they were torched as opposed to hit by shells or bombs. Only homes along the main road through Tamarasheni had collapsed walls; Georgian villagers report that Russian tanks had systematically fired into these houses on August 10.

Human Rights Watch concludes that what they have seen “adds up to compelling evidence of war crimes and grave human rights abuses” and says the Russian government should prosecute those responsible.

 Human Rights Watch does great work, and its researchers are brave men and women. I crossed paths with them several times along the Chad – Darfur border in 2006, and they were willing to venture closer to death and destruction than most. One can only assume that this last bit about urging the Russians to prosecute those responsible shows they have a sense of humour, too, because Russian guilt starts at the top.

 Immediately after this conflict began, Vladimir Putin, who still runs the show in Russia, accused Georgia of genocide and said they were responsible for 2,000 deaths. Russian media were full of lurid atrocity stories, such as one about Georgian soldiers herding Ossetian civilians into a church and setting it on fire. The Nazis actually committed such a crime in the French village of Oradour-sur-Glane during the Second World War. Hollywood resurrected the story in the Mel Gibson stinker The Patriot. Nothing of the sort took place in South Ossetia.

Human Rights Watch  interviewed a doctor at the only hospital in Tskhinvali, who said 44 bodies had been brought to the hospital since the fighting began, military personnel and civilians. She said that most people killed in the city had been brought to the hospital prior to burial because they local morgue was not working. She added that most of the wounded were military personnel. Russia has since scaled back its casualty estimate to 133 – although Collin Sawatzky, in a letter in this week’s issue of Maclean’s, repeats the slur that the Georgians killed “some 1,000 civilians,” in addition to more than a dozen Russian “peacekeepers.”

In other words, Putin lied. Well, politicians lie all the time – and the less free a society is the more its politicians lie, because they don’t have to worry about journalists calling them out. But Putin’s lies about massacres and ethnic cleansing resulted in real life atrocities taking place when Osettians and, it would appear, Russian soldiers had their opportunity to take revenge for something that never happened. 

Because as you know, Berlusconi is key

By Paul Wells - Monday, August 25, 2008 at 2:31 PM - 0 Comments

Dick Cheney to visit Georgia and other countries in the region. Because he just likes to be helpful.

Best Sentence I Read Yesterday About the Caucasus

By Andrew Potter - Monday, August 25, 2008 at 1:30 PM - 0 Comments

But while my instinctive sense in the Russian-Georgian conflict is that the Russians are in the wrong, I think it’s important not to assume that therefore the Georgians are in the right, or ought to get what they want.

That’s Eugene Volokh, with some pointers to some very helpful posts.

Gergiev, Shostakovich, Tskhinvali

By Paul Wells - Friday, August 22, 2008 at 1:55 PM - 0 Comments

Turns out the great Russian conductor Valery Gergiev is Ossetian and, having made his career in St. Petersburg, a friend of Putin’s. He took his Orchestra of the Mariinsky Theatre to Tskhinvali last night and conducted the Shostakovich 7th Symphony in an outdoor concert to commemorate “victims of Georgian aggression.”

Here‘s a column I wrote on Gergiev and Shostakovich a few years ago. Frankly I’m heartsick at the conductor’s decision to insert himself into this story on what, to me, seems the aggressor’s side. But it has almost always been true that where you stand depends on where you sit, and an Ossetian from St. Petersburg would probably see things differently. Sigh.

Georgia/Russia: Hard to say goodbye

By Paul Wells - Thursday, August 21, 2008 at 4:21 PM - 0 Comments

The commander of Russia’s invasion force says he doesn’t expect to leave Georgia for 10 days, anyway. They were supposed to be gone by tomorrow, after they were supposed to be gone on Monday, after they were supposed to be gone last week, after they were never supposed to invade in the first place.

The killing of Georgia

By Andrew Coyne - Monday, August 18, 2008 at 9:10 PM - 0 Comments

“But NATO will be no use to anyone [if] it has already squandered its credibility by promising soldiers it can’t spare to countries that aren’t members.”

Then we are agreed. Paul Wells is adamant that we should not make promises we can’t keep. And I am equally adamant that we should not keep promises we haven’t made.

Which makes it a little odd that my friend spends so much time and wordage rubbishing an idea that no one, to my knowledge, has suggested: namely, that we should send NATO troops, now, to fight the Russians in Georgia. Such a course of action might — or might not — be entailed if Georgia were a member of NATO. But Georgia is not a member of NATO. The question is whether Georgia ought to be a member of NATO. I am for it. Wells is against it (or so far as he is for it, only for those bits of Georgia that Russia is content it should have).

Wells is for treating each instance of real or potential Russian aggression as a separate and discrete event (“not everything can be a test of Western will”). I would be, too, if I thought it were possible. But they are linked, inescapably — because Russia’s actions in any particular event are in part determined by ours, or rather by expectations of ours, and because its expectations of what we will do next time are shaped by what we did last time. What we do now in Georgia, therefore, is critical to what we may have to do later somewhere else — just as the decisions facing us in Georgia today are in part a result of what we did or did not do about Georgia in the past. Continue…

Whee!

By Paul Wells - Sunday, August 17, 2008 at 10:03 PM - 0 Comments

Short-range Russian ballistic missiles in South Ossetia, anyone?

Georgia/Russia: Remnick surfaces, with a roar

By Paul Wells - Saturday, August 16, 2008 at 12:14 PM - 0 Comments

The New Yorker editor must have cursed the way his magazine’s publication schedule popped out a double issue during the busiest two weeks in the summer. So he’s had to watch, a little helpless, for two weeks while Solzhenitsyn died and Russia launched its first shooting war on foreign soil in decades. This has been more than a busy couple of weeks to David Remnick, who was a great Moscow bureau reporter for the Washington Post and whose book Lenin’s Tomb is one of the definitive chronicles of the Soviet Union’s collapse. I have been waiting to see what he would make of all this. His column is now up on his magazine’s website. It has been worth the wait.

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Georgia/Russia: A good cop emerges, but is that a tin badge?

By Paul Wells - Saturday, August 16, 2008 at 10:01 AM - 0 Comments

This business of a U.S. ballistic-missile defense system in Poland is a long story, but if you’re still reading my posts on the Georgia conflict, you will almost certainly have noticed the bellicose reaction of a senior Russian general, who said:

“Poland, by deploying (the system) is exposing itself to a strike — 100 percent,” Gen. Anatoly Nogovitsyn, the deputy chief of staff of Russia’s armed forces, was quoted by the Interfax news agency as saying.

He noted Russia’s military doctrine sanctions the use of nuclear weapons “against the allies of countries having nuclear weapons if they in some way help them.” Nogovitsyn said that would include elements of any strategic deterrence system, according to Interfax.

That’s maybe not ideal, this threatening a nuclear war thing. But I’m struck by the reaction of Russia’s president (should I put quotes around that word? “President”?), Dmitri Medvedev, who said the U.S. deployment in Poland “is sad news for all who live on this densely populated continent, but it is not dramatic.”

I frankly don’t know what to make of the two quotations juxtaposed. My hunch is that if you think you do know, you’re faking. Things are moving quickly, both Russia and the U.S. and its allies are changing the equation every few hours, but there seem to be two very different messages going out. One question though: If I was the president of a big country and one of my top generals was recklessly threatening nuclear strikes, I’d sack him. Yet Nogovitsyn keeps his job. Does Medvedev approve of his messaging, or is he unable to discipline his generals? (Again, perhaps that one needs air quotes: ” ‘his’ generals.”)