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The Thawing of a Frozen Conflict: The
Internal Security Dilemma and the
2004 Prelude to the Russo-Georgian
War
Cory Welt
a
a
Georgetown University,
Version of record first published: 21 Dec 2009.
To cite this article: Cory Welt (2010): The Thawing of a Frozen Conflict: The Internal Security
Dilemma and the 2004 Prelude to the Russo-Georgian War, Europe-Asia Studies, 62:1, 63-97
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09668130903385390
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The Thawing of a Frozen Conﬂict: The
Internal Security Dilemma and the 2004
Prelude to the Russo-Georgian War
CORY WELT
Abstract
While the proximate causes of the 2008 Russo–Georgian war have yet to be satisfactorily investigated,
an assessment of an earlier occasion of conﬂict in South Ossetia in 2004 can lay the groundwork for an
analysis of the later war. Like the 2008 war, the 2004 conﬂict was comprehensible on the basis of the
ambitious war plans of opposing sides, but it was ultimately rooted in a security dilemma. The conﬂict
thus provides a precedent for considering how a mix of limited oﬀensive intentions, insecurity,
uncertainty, and cognitive shortcuts and misperceptions had the capacity to lead to inadvertent war
between Russia and Georgia over South Ossetia.
THE AUGUST 2008 WAR BETWEEN RUSSIA AND GEORGIA is commonly said to have
begun with a Georgian oﬀensive on Tskhinvali, the administrative centre of the
breakaway region of South Ossetia, as well as on Russian troops that crossed into
South Ossetia, a de facto Russian protectorate, around the time of the Georgian
operation.1
The oﬀensive resulted in a Russian counterattack to drive Georgia out of
I acknowledge with gratitude and admiration Theresa Freese, whose groundbreaking ﬁeld reporting
on the Georgian–South Ossetian conﬂict of 2004 greatly inspired and informed this article. I would
also like to thank intern James Kelly at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) and
graduate students Binio Binev, Dan Zuckerman and Pavle Milekic at Georgetown University for
exemplary research assistance. I gratefully acknowledge the prior support of the US Institute of Peace
for the research and writing of this article, as well as the institutional support of the Carnegie
Corporation of New York.
1
The sequence or at least signiﬁcance of troop movements on 7 August and earlier remains in
dispute. The Georgian government asserts, on the basis of intelligence and several post-war Russian
media reports, that several groupings of Russian armed forces crossed into South Ossetia on and
before 7 August, prior to the Georgian oﬀensive on Tskhinvali. Even the de facto President of
Abkhazia, Sergey Bagapsh, said on 7 August that a Russian military battalion was in Tskhinvali. The
Russian government says that Russian forces moved into South Ossetia only after Georgia launched its
late-night oﬀensive, though oﬃcials do not deny the prior transit of armed ‘volunteers’ or ‘rotations’ of
peacekeeping forces. For initial statements of the Georgian position, see ‘Statement of the Government
of Georgia Regarding the Situation in the South Ossetia Region of Georgia’, 8 August 2008, available
at: http://www.government.gov.ge/index.php?lang_id¼ENG&sec_id¼103&info_id¼1982; and
EUROPE-ASIA STUDIES
Vol. 62, No. 1, January 2010, 63–97
ISSN 0966-8136 print; ISSN 1465-3427 online/10/010063-35 ª 2010 University of Glasgow
DOI: 10.1080/09668130903385390
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Tskhinvali and, indeed, all South Ossetia (of which Georgia controlled a substantial
portion before the war); ethnic cleansing of some 20,000 Georgians (who made up
about a third of the region’s pre-war population); air, land and sea attacks much
further into Georgia; the loss of a remote but strategic territory in Georgia’s second
breakaway region of Abkhazia; and, ﬁnally, Russian military occupation of both
regions and unilateral recognition of their independence.
That the ‘Tskhinvali oﬀensive’ resulted in such high losses for Georgia suggests, to
some, a cautionary tale regarding the unintended consequences of an overly ambitious
Georgian war of choice. Another, perhaps more prominent, interpretation of the war
is that Russia, in collaboration with its South Ossetian client, subversively launched its
own war of choice to secure control over the breakaway region. However, these are
not the only possibilities. The war may not have been driven directly by Russian or
Georgian ambitions at all, but instead triggered inadvertently by a security dilemma.
Further research is required to uncover satisfactorily the proximate causes of the
August 2008 war. However, an analysis of an earlier occasion of conﬂict in South
Ossetia four years before can lay the groundwork. In a causal sense, the low-level but
lethal conﬂict of 2004 established the military-strategic environment which facilitated
a rapid escalation to war in August 2008. More importantly, the 2004 conﬂict was also
comprehensible on the basis of the ambitious war plans of either side, but it was
ultimately rooted in a security dilemma. The conﬂict thus provides a precedent for
how a mix of limited oﬀensive intentions, insecurity (and other motivations),
uncertainty, and cognitive shortcuts and misperceptions had the capacity to lead to
inadvertent war between Russia and Georgia over South Ossetia.
This article has two main sections. The ﬁrst explains how and why armed conﬂict
arose within South Ossetia in 2004. Observers can easily misconstrue the origins of a
security-dilemma conﬂict such as this, for security dilemmas emerge out of a variety of
intentions and motivations: defensive insecurity, oﬀensive insecurity, and even
oﬀensive ambition. The origins of a security-dilemma conﬂict have to be empirically
investigated, not assumed. This, however, is an uncertain enterprise, thanks not only
to the diﬃculties of gathering and assessing evidence, but also to the more abstract
challenge of how to deﬁne motivations and distinguish among multiple ones. As this
section discusses, this is particularly true in analyses of internal conﬂict.
The trigger to the 2004 conﬂict is not in dispute: it was new restrictions on trade and
movement that Georgia imposed in and around South Ossetia. The question is why
‘Russian Invasion of Georgia: Media and Telephone Intercepts Conﬁrm Russia Started the War’,
Georgia Update, Government of Georgia, 20 September 2008, available at: http://georgiaupdate.gov.ge/en/doc/10006597/Evidence%20Russia%20started%202008.09.20.pdf.
For Bagapsh’s statement,
see Rossiya TV (Moscow), 7 August 2008, translated in BBC Monitoring, available via:
http://www.lexisnexis.com/us/lnacademic. For initial Russian responses to Georgian claims, see
Chivers (2008) and ‘Kremlin Releases Their Version of Events in Georgia’, Washington Times POTUS
Notes, 19 August 2008, available at: http://www3.washingtontimes.com/weblogs/potus-notes/2008/
aug/19/kremlin-releases-their-version-events-georgia/; all sites accessed September 2008. On the build
up to the war, also see the extensive collection of documents and materials available at: http://
georgiaupdate.gov.ge/en/backgrounders, accessed June 2009, and also Allison (2008) and Cornell and
Starr (2009). This article was completed before the September 2009 release of the Report of the
Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on the Conﬂict in Georgia, established by the
Council of the European Union (http://www.ceiig.ch/Report.html). The contents of the Report do not
alter the article’s conclusions.
64 CORY WELT
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Georgia imposed these restrictions. While diﬀerent combinations of intentions (defensive
or oﬀensive) and motivations (insecurity or ambition) are plausible, in reality it
was Georgia’s limited oﬀensive intentions and, probably, its mixed motivations of
insecurity and ambition that triggered the conﬂict. Georgia was not a purely defensive
security-seeker, but neither did it launch a reckless war of ambition. It was seeking
nonviolent regime change in South Ossetia and, by extension, a resolution of the longstanding
conﬂict. The escalation that resulted from this eﬀort to change the status quo
was undesired and unexpected and it was propelled by a security dilemma.
The second section investigates the mechanics of this security dilemma. Heightened
structural uncertainties and vulnerabilities make the likelihood of security-dilemma
escalation greater in an intra-state setting (with weakened central authority) than in an
inter-state setting. At the same time, the interaction between internal uncertainties and
vulnerabilities and more traditional external threats also increases the likelihood of
escalation. Even then, however, structural conditions may not be suﬃcient to trigger
conﬂict; rather, they establish a context in which actors form mistaken presumptions
about other actors’ intentions, exaggerate threats, and mistakenly signal intentions
they do not possess. Misperception, distortion, and blunders directly precipitate
security-dilemma escalation. Structural conditions provide a permissive environment
for these processes to occur while driving escalation more ‘automatically’ in their
wake.
These propositions emerge out of an analysis of the escalation that occurred in
South Ossetia in 2004. At ﬁrst glance, the conﬂict represents a mechanical case of
security-dilemma escalation. Georgian restrictions threatened South Ossetians and led
to countermeasures by both Ossetians and Russia, their patron, to defend territorial
and administrative control and local freedom of movement and, ultimately, to deter a
potential Georgian military oﬀensive. Georgians viewed these countermeasures as
threatening to local Georgian populations and to their control of territory within the
breakaway region. They thus felt compelled to take defensive and deterrent measures
which, in turn, threatened Ossetians even more. This spiral led the parties to the brink
of unwanted war.
Still, escalation did not occur automatically. The real trigger was a speciﬁc
(Georgian) action and the cognitive misperceptions that ﬂowed from that action or
minimised its impact. At the start of the conﬂict, Georgia made a move only
tangentially related to its objective of restricting trade and movement in and around
South Ossetia: the rapid deployment of several hundred special forces troops into the
so-called conﬂict zone, an area with a 15-kilometre radius deﬁned in a 1992 ceaseﬁre
agreement and centred on Tskhinvali. This action—not Georgia’s general restrictions
on trade and movement—triggered Ossetian and Russian countermeasures and
increased suspicions that Georgia was preparing a military oﬀensive against South
Ossetia. Consistent with the cognitive ‘shortcuts’ individuals are said to take under
conditions of uncertainty, the South Ossetian and Russian leaderships inferred far
greater oﬀensive intentions from this action than Georgians actually possessed.
Likewise, Georgians were hard pressed to perceive Ossetian and Russian countermeasures
as genuinely defensive reactions to an action they knew did not signal
oﬀensive intent. A cycle of insecurity-driven escalation resulted.
The conﬂict of 2004 raised the spectre of inadvertent war in South Ossetia and laid the
groundwork for it to break out at a later date. It demonstrated that conﬂict in South
THE THAWING OF A FROZEN CONFLICT 65
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Ossetia could arise not because Russia or Georgia were seeking war but because of
limited oﬀensive intentions, insecurity and other motivations, uncertainty, and cognitive
shortcuts and misperceptions—in short, a security dilemma. Establishing the role of a
security dilemma in the 2004 conﬂictdoes not establish that a similar causal process led to
the August 2008 war, but, as I argue in the ﬁnal section, it provides a compelling avenue
for investigation.
Why conﬂict? Disentangling Georgian motivations and intentions
Triggering a security dilemma: a typology of motivations and intentions
Typically invoked to explain inadvertent wars, or the road to such wars, the ‘security
dilemma’ traditionally has had two diﬀerent, albeit overlapping, deﬁnitions. The ﬁrst
centres on the eﬀect of one actor’s actions on another, the dilemma being that ‘many
of the means by which [an actor] tries to increase its security decrease the security of
others’ (Jervis 1978, p. 169). The second focuses on the impact of an actor’s actions on
itself: ‘what one does to enhance one’s own security causes reactions that, in the end,
can make one less secure’ (Posen 1993, p. 28).2
While either deﬁnition can be useful for explaining unwanted conﬂicts, the second
provides greater analytical purchase in two ways. First, it more consistently retains the
notion of inadvertency at the core of the security dilemma (Jervis 1976, p. 66; Posen
1991, p. 13) by focusing on the unintentional ‘blowback’ eﬀect of one’s actions
(whereas the ﬁrst deﬁnition allows for either unintentional or intentional actions
against another). The second deﬁnition also resolves a paradox in the treatment of
security dilemmas, which are often said to arise from either security or ambition (often
referred to as ‘predation’ or ‘greed’) (Snyder 1985, pp. 156, 165–66; Jervis 1993, p. 245;
Glaser 1992, p. 505, 1997, pp. 190–91; Snyder & Jervis 1999, pp. 19–24). On the
surface, this seems contradictory, as the security dilemma is supposed to explain
outcomes produced by security-seeking behaviour. If conﬂict is regarded as an
iterative process, however, the paradox disappears, as what an actor initially does to
enhance its non-security goals can cause reactions that unexpectedly make it insecure.3
The problem with this nuance, of course, is that even if one observes a security
dilemma in action, this reveals nothing about what triggered the security dilemma in
the ﬁrst place. As Paul Roe (2001, 2004) has usefully elaborated, at least three
combinations of motivations and intentions can trigger security-dilemma escalation.
The classic formulation stems from insecurity, which leads an actor to take defensive
action that another actor fears signals (or might signal) oﬀensive intent. An action–
reaction cycle leading to higher levels of tension and possibly armed conﬂict follows,
as the actors take increasingly risky or threatening measures to alleviate their mutually
2
Jervis also utilised this second deﬁnition, noting that ‘[w]hen states seek the ability to defend
themselves, they get too much and too little . . . too little because others, being menaced, will increase
their own arms and so reduce the ﬁrst state’s security’ (Jervis 1976, p. 64).
3
Citing a preference for the second deﬁnition, Glaser (1997, p. 174) has also argued that the ﬁrst is
unsatisfactory since it ‘does not make clear why the security dilemma is a problem’: from an actor’s
perspective, reducing another’s security to increase one’s own does not represent much of a dilemma.
66 CORY WELT
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rising insecurity (Herz 1950, p. 157; Butterﬁeld 1951, pp. 19–21; Jervis 1976, pp. 68–75,
1978, pp. 181–82).4
Security-dilemma escalation does not only have its roots, or even its most common
roots, in defensive security-seeking behaviour, however.5
An actor may believe that its
security ‘requires the insecurity of others’, so that it needs to take oﬀensive action to be
secure (Snyder 1985, p. 155).6
Such action triggers a security dilemma when an actor
mistakenly expects the action to increase its security without provoking an extended
conﬂict.7
Furthermore, oﬀensive action does not have to be security-driven initially for
it to lead to a security dilemma. As mentioned, an ambitious (‘greedy’ or ‘predatory’)
actor can also inadvertently end up in a security-reducing conﬂict that it did not
expect.8
In sum, just because a security dilemma drives the escalation of a particular conﬂict
does not mean that the conﬂict was, as the classical version of the security dilemma
would have it, a ‘tragic’ clash of defensive insecurities (Roe 1999). Defensive securityseeking
behaviour may have triggered the conﬂict, but so might oﬀensive securityseeking
behaviour or even oﬀensive ambition.
Deﬁning and distinguishing among motivations and intentions in internal conﬂict
While assessing the motivations and intentions that lead to a security dilemma is
desirable, it can also be extremely diﬃcult. In addition to problems of selfrationalisation
and dissimulation, actors can have multiple motivations (Glaser
1992, pp. 505–06, 1997, p. 190; Snyder & Jervis 1999, pp. 19–20; Jervis 2001, pp. 37–
38).9
As for intentions, it is often as unclear to observers as to participants what an
actor may be doing, let alone why. Diﬃculties arise in diﬀerentiating between
4
For other elaborations of the classic formulation, see Snyder (1985, pp. 157, 161–64), Glaser (1992,
pp. 182–83), Collins (2000) and Roe (2000, 2004, pp. 284–86), who refers to this as a ‘tight’ security
dilemma.
5
Roe (2000, p. 389) suggests that the conditions that frame the classic security dilemma are so
restrictive that it is not so common in reality. Indeed, in Lebow’s classic study of crisis escalation (1981,
pp. 23–24), only one of the 28 cases examined was arguably the product of a classic security dilemma
(when ‘central decision-makers [perceived] that the provocation triggering the crisis [was] both
undesired and unsanctioned by the central decision-makers of the adversary’.)
6
Jervis (2001, pp. 40–41, 53) refers to this as a deep security dilemma, while Roe calls it a ‘regular’
security dilemma (2004, pp. 286–87). Also see Jervis (1976, pp. 63–64, 1978, pp. 168–69, 185–87) and
Glaser (1992, pp. 501–05). Some scholars (Schweller 1996, p. 117; Collins 2000, p. 25) do not agree that
security dilemmas can arise from oﬀensive behaviour, asserting that only the ‘classic’ security dilemma
as Herz (1950) and Butterﬁeld (1951) conceptualised it is properly a security dilemma.
7
On ‘false optimism’ as a cause of war, see Blainey (1988) and Van Evera (1999, pp. 14–34).
8
Snyder (1985, p. 156), for example, notes that in a situation in which ‘[a]ll states prefer compromise
to a major war’, a security dilemma can ‘arise from the dynamics of limited competition over nonsecurity
interests’ as ‘expansionists [seek] to achieve their limited imperial aims without provoking a
major war, which would entail disproportionate costs and risks’. More brieﬂy, Jervis (1993, p. 245) also
suggested that even a generally ‘aggressive’ state may end up in a war that it did not desire, as either it
or its opponent succumbs to ‘the reciprocal fear of surprise attack’. This appears to be what Roe (2004,
pp. 288–89) has in mind by a ‘loose’ security dilemma.
9
Van Evera (1999, p. 185) has also noted that ‘security motives . . . are in fact ubiquitous’ and almost
always play a role ‘sometimes minor, often major’ in causing wars.
THE THAWING OF A FROZEN CONFLICT 67
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defensive and oﬀensive capabilities (Jervis 1978, pp. 199–206; Posen 1993, pp. 29–31;
Glaser 1997, pp. 186–87). Actors can also have strategic and diplomatic incentives to
misrepresent oﬀensive intentions as defensive ones.
The challenge of determining motivations and intentions in internal conﬂict is
especially great. Part of this challenge is a matter of deﬁnition. When a national
government confronts a secessionist region, for example, it is usually not motivated (or
not only motivated) by what we might consider to be conventional security concerns,
the protection of territory or population under de facto state control or the tightening
of de facto state borders. It is also seeking to establish control over lost territory,
something often considered a goal motivated by ambition (or predation or greed).
However, the defence of sovereignty over one’s territory is the sine qua non of state
security by virtually all standards of international relations. It is thus a real question
whether a government’s eﬀorts, armed or otherwise, to establish control over territory
legally recognised as part of the state’s sovereign domain should ever be deﬁned as
anything other than security-driven. While an observer might try to draw an analytical
line between insecurity and other motivations (such as ambition, predation or greed)
in triggering conﬂict between a state and a secessionist actor, it is more diﬃcult to
demonstrate that they are so conceptually divided in actors’ own minds.
This does not mean that we must lump together all motivations that can lead to an
internal security dilemma. Theoretically, governments can be motivated by conventional,
or what we might call ‘inland’, security—if, for example, secessionist regions
have launched military strikes or have been a base for terrorist activities. In such cases,
governments could act to shore up inland security in the absence of more abstract
concerns for territorial integrity. It may be possible, thus, to determine at least what
‘kind’ of security a government seeks—inland security or a more abstract notion of
state security related to the defence of territorial integrity. At the same time, a
government may be motivated simultaneously by inland insecurity, an abstract sense
of insecurity linked to the loss of territory, and a range of ambitions that encourage it
to regain lost territories (including political glory or advantage, and international
strategic or economic advantage).
In addition to motivations, the intentions of a government toward a secessionist
region can also be diﬃcult to ascertain. Internal conﬂicts erase state borders that help
diﬀerentiate oﬀensive intentions from defensive ones. Between states, military
movement across internationally recognised borders is by deﬁnition oﬀensive.
However, in the case of secessionist conﬂict, where borders are contested, the
movement of armed forces ‘across’ an internal border does not necessarily imply
oﬀensive intentions. It may also signify an attempt to better defend territory that is
poorly controlled by either side. This ambiguity is especially acute when citizens loyal
to the state (usually of the ethnic majority) are located on the other side of a disputed
internal border, allowing the state to reasonably claim a right to their defence.
With these ambiguities in mind, we turn our attention to the origin of armed conﬂict
between Georgia and secessionist South Ossetia in 2004 and, in particular, the initial
intentions and motivations of Georgia, whose change in behaviour triggered the
conﬂict. Georgians may have had defensive intentions and been motivated to shore up
their inland security, or they may have been planning oﬀensive action to address
Georgia’s insecurity, whether inland or a more abstract kind. Alternatively, the
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government may have been ambitious and may have harboured oﬀensive intentions—
even including war; these are all theoretically possible and, as we will see, empirically
plausible. They all could have led to the process of escalation that occurred.
In the next section I describe Georgia’s new policy toward South Ossetia after the
2003 Rose Revolution, a policy that triggered armed conﬂict between Georgians and
South Ossetians. I then present the combinations of motivations and intentions that
could have led to this policy. I contrast the Georgian government’s public claim to
defensive security-seeking behaviour with what was more privately revealed as limited
oﬀensive intentions. Finally, I address the diverse motivations behind such oﬀensive
(but not war-seeking) intentions.
The trigger: ‘Rose Revolutionary’ Georgia’s war on smuggling
In May 1992, Georgians and Ossetians signed a peace agreement ending hostilities in
one of the earliest violent conﬂicts to accompany the collapse of the USSR. The two
ethnic communities lived interspersed in Georgia’s formerly autonomous region of
South Ossetia, now legally abolished but de facto independent; they traded peacefully
in a region-wide black market of goods (including wholesale staples like ﬂour and fuel)
illegally imported to Georgia from Russia. This ‘cold peace’ oﬀered little hope of a
political settlement to the long-standing separatist conﬂict but was otherwise stable.
The Georgian–South Ossetian conﬂict reignited just months after Georgia’s
November 2003 Rose Revolution. The conﬂict began innocuously enough in the
context of a ‘war on smuggling’ launched by Georgia’s new government in a bid to
improve state revenue collection, eradicate oﬃcial involvement in cross-border crime,
and to reduce the porosity of state borders. The anti-smuggling campaign began in
Gori, the administrative centre of the Shida Kartli region that formally includes
most of South Ossetia, by regional governor Irakli Okruashvili, who as Georgia’s
minister of internal aﬀairs later became a principal actor in the South Ossetian events
(Freese 2004a). In December, Georgian interior forces detained trucks importing
Russian ﬂour illegally via South Ossetia (without a customs check or paying Georgian
excise tax) and raided a nearby ﬂourmill.10
At the end of the month, Okruashvili
ordered the destruction of numerous roads leading out of South Ossetia that did not
pass through populated areas and which authorities said were used for illegal
imports.11
In the next months Georgian oﬃcials publicly paid little attention to South Ossetia,
as they concentrated on forming a new government and pressuring regional despot
10
Imedi TV (Tbilisi), Rustavi-2 TV (Tbilisi), and ITAR-TASS (Moscow), translated in BBC
Monitoring, 11 December 2003, available via: http://www.lexisnexis.com/us/lnacademic, accessed
November 2007; IA Regnum (Moscow), 11, 12 December 2003, available at: http://www.regnum.ru,
accessed November 2007. In addition to the three translated sources above, all references to the sources
listed below were accessed in translation in BBC Monitoring (available via: http://www.lexisnexis.com/
us/lnacademic, all sites accessed November 2008): Georgian State Television Channel One (Sakartvelos
Sakhelmtsipo Televiziis Pirveli Arkhi), Kavkasia-Press, Mze TV (Tbilisi), and Channel One TV (Pervyi
Kanal), Ekho Moskvy Radio, Interfax, NTV, NTV Mir, Radio Mayak, RIA Novosti, RTR Russia TV,
Tsentr-TV and Nezavisimaya Gazeta (Moscow).
11
Imedi TV, 27 December 2003.
THE THAWING OF A FROZEN CONFLICT 69
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Aslan Abashidze to surrender power in Georgia’s autonomous republic of Adjara.
However, a Georgian police presence in areas of South Ossetia, nominally under the
control of the region’s de facto authorities, was strengthened at this time.12
After the defeat of Abashidze at the start of May, the government again turned its
full attention to South Ossetia, seeking to stop smuggling through the region and to
oﬀer heightened protection to ‘islands’ of ethnic Georgians, including those in the
villages of the Didi Liakhvi gorge north of Tskhinvali, South Ossetia’s administrative
centre. In mid-May, Minister of Internal Aﬀairs Giorgi Baramidze visited Georgianpopulated
villages to discuss the strengthening of local police forces and the insertion
of new armed divisions into the region.13
The anti-smuggling campaign involved the
establishment of at least 13 Georgian checkpoints, mainly on the South Ossetian
perimeter but including one within South Ossetia, in the village of Eredvi, a few
kilometres from Tskhinvali in the Patara Liakhvi gorge to its east.14
These checkpoints
were staﬀed by police but also, in the words of Georgian President Mikheil
Saakashvili, ‘party activists . . . those people who want to make the country look
decent’.15
Okruashvili further explained: ‘[w]e organized 10 to 15 groups, gave them
fuel and cars with an order to stop the contraband’. By the end of May, the campaign
in South Ossetia ‘[had come] to resemble an election drive, with extra interior ministry
personnel, local authorities, and villagers working round-the-clock shifts’ (Freese
2005, p. 112).
As a result of such frenetic activity, the operation appeared to accomplish its goal.
On 24 May, the new governor of Shida Kartli, Mikheil Kareli, reported that 40 roads
leading out of South Ossetia had been closed.16
One week later, Saakashvili boasted
that the government had ‘completely stopped contraband from South Ossetia’. Other
government oﬃcials aﬃrmed that, thanks to the operations of recent weeks,
contraband passing through South Ossetia had been reduced to almost nothing and
that the Ergneti market, the locus of trade in goods transiting through South Ossetia
located on the region’s southern border, was starved of goods and would soon be
closed.17
Why trigger conﬂict? Georgia’s initial motivations and intentions
What was Georgia trying to accomplish in bringing the ‘war on smuggling’ to South
Ossetia? The initial insertion of armed personnel primarily around, rather than in,
South Ossetia (with the exception of the Georgian villages) suggests that oﬃcials
meant what they said, that the operations were part of a defensive ‘inland’ strategy
intended to tighten Georgia’s de facto state borders by reasserting control over transit
12
Police were deployed in the Georgian-populated areas of Proni, southwest of Tskhinvali, and
Patara Liakhvi, east of Tskhinvali. By the end of April, 64 policemen were operating in these two
gorges (Freese 2004a).
13
IA Regnum, 18 May 2004.
14
Imedi TV, 31 May 2004; ITAR-TASS, 31 May, 6 June 2004.
15
Georgian State Television Channel One (Tbilisi), 31 May 2004.
16
IA Regnum, 24 May 2004.
17
The market was reported closed by mid-June (Georgian State Television Channel One and Imedi
TV, 31 May 2004; Kavkasia-Press (Tbilisi), 12 June 2004; IA Regnum, 14 June 2004).
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traﬃc to and from South Ossetia. At the same time, the fact that armed personnel were
inserted directly into South Ossetia at all suggests that Georgia may not have been
seeking only to establish a defensive perimeter of its de facto border but to make
inroads within South Ossetia proper, whether incrementally by expanding territorial
control, or by seeking full control over the region. If so, such oﬀensive action could
have had a number of diﬀerent motivations: the protection of ‘inland’ security through
a more forward-leaning posture; the securing of a more abstract state security through
the restoration of territorial integrity; or the fulﬁlment of various political and
personal ambitions by retaking lost territory.
Defensive security?
Georgia’s actions in South Ossetia might have been motivated by inland insecurity and
intended as solely defensive. Tightening the borders with South Ossetia was in line
with the Georgian authorities’ overall goal of increasing state security by securing the
country’s borders and strengthening state institutions, including clamping down on
border corruption and increasing customs revenue. This was a signiﬁcant element of
the platform that had elevated the ruling team to power, and, by the time the conﬂict
began, the government had already begun to employ other tactics to battle corruption
and increase budget revenues, such as compelling businesspeople to pay formerly
overlooked tax arrears, and reforming the traﬃc police. Soon after, the government
began to purge border guards and customs personnel (Areshidze 2007, pp. 193–95,
211–16; Welt 2005a).
From the standpoint of border security, taking the ‘war on smuggling’ to South
Ossetia made sense. South Ossetia was long acknowledged to be a channel for the
import of contraband goods into Georgia. Georgian oﬃcials also argued that this
uncontrolled territory could serve as a route for arms and drug traﬃcking, as well as a
haven for criminals or terrorists, a plausible contention given its border with Russia’s
fragile North Caucasus region. By this interpretation, increasing a police presence in
Georgian-populated villages within South Ossetia could have been intrinsically
defensive, a precautionary measure to deter potential reprisals by those negatively
aﬀected by the stepped-up monitoring of the border.
This security logic was matched by the government’s own explanations for its
behaviour. Throughout the summer, Saakashvili insisted that Georgian mobilisation
in South Ossetia was an element of the government’s broader security strategy. South
Ossetia, he said in June,
was a black hole from where contraband was coming. We have stopped that contraband. This
is the main achievement . . . According to my calculations, this will bring an extra 200–250
million lari [$100–125 million] to the Georgian budget, once we have [also] blocked
contraband in Samegrelo [the province bordering Georgia’s second breakaway region,
Abkhazia]. Most of that money will be spent on strengthening our state agencies, including,
in the ﬁrst place, our police and military structures, so that there is peace and our population
is protected.18
18
Rustavi-2 TV, 12 June 2004.
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Over the next few weeks, Saakashvili repeatedly invoked this justiﬁcation, noting that
[o]ur goal at this stage has been achieved. We have closed the economic border, blocked
contraband, ensured the security of residents in the Didi and Patara Liakhvi gorges, and
showed to everyone that we are not joking and are ready to defend Georgia’s interests.19
He later reiterated this claim: ‘We have closed our economic borders. Now Georgia
should get stronger and get back on its feet. It should get stronger in all respects—
militarily, economically and from the point of view of policing’.20
Or oﬀensive intentions?
While an interpretation of Georgian behaviour as defensive and motivated by inland
security is plausible, in point of fact the Georgian government was not pursuing a
solely defensive strategy. It was trying to subvert—and ultimately depose—the local
regime as a precursor to the reassertion of state control over South Ossetia. In private,
Georgian ministers and other oﬃcials acknowledged that their strategy in South
Ossetia ‘wasn’t only economic’.21
The Georgian government had
set to work in early 2004 using anti-contraband measures as a dual-purpose mechanism:
. . . to add revenues to Georgia’s ailing budget [but also] to oust the . . . government of
the de facto president, Eduard Kokoiti . . . Without contraband funds to prop up his
government and security services, Kokoiti’s ‘regime of bandits’ would fall apart, or so went
the thinking. (Freese 2005, pp. 109–10)
Underpinning this strategy was a belief that the Georgian government could
persuade the South Ossetian population to back eﬀorts to oust the local leadership
and return the region to its control. Georgian oﬃcials thought that ‘Ossetians, fed up
with the ‘‘corrupt Kokoiti clan’’, would rise up against him [Kokoiti], similar to what
occurred in Adjara’ (Freese 2005, p. 109). In the ﬁrst weeks of conﬂict, Georgian
oﬃcials repeated mantra-like that South Ossetians were no diﬀerent than Georgians
and were suﬃciently disillusioned with their ‘criminal’ leadership to support political
change.22
Though they did not know how much support they could get, they appeared
to believe that a suﬃcient number of Ossetians were ready for change and willing to
side with the Georgians against their own leadership to reach a tipping point for mass
mobilisation. Even Georgian civil society activists, key actors in Georgia’s Rose
19
Imedi TV, 13 July 2004. Saakashvili also noted that ‘[i]n general, we, of course, have managed to
do the main thing—all [ethnic Georgian] villages are protected. In principle the security regime is very
ﬁrm’ (Rustavi-2 TV, 12 July 2004).
20
Imedi TV, 19 July 2004.
21
Author’s interview (anonymous), October 2004, Tbilisi.
22
Givi Targamadze, chairman of the Georgian parliament’s defence and security committee, insisted
at the start of June that ‘the attitude of 99 per cent of South Ossetia’s population is absolutely
unambiguous. They invariably refer to this person [Kokoiti] as a bandit who runs his own group of
bandits’ (Rustavi-2 TV, 2 June 2004). Also see RIA Novosti (Moscow), 2 June 2004; Imedi TV, 8 July
2004; and Ekho Moskvy Radio (Moscow), 13 July 2004.
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Revolution, were operating in Tskhinvali at the time, seeking ‘to attract revolutionary
support from within the Ossetian community’.23
To further encourage South Ossetians, the government sought to establish
Georgia’s benevolence toward the Ossetian population through a series of ‘socioeconomic
incentives’. These included ‘establishing an Ossetian-language television
station in Shida Kartli; providing pensions to Ossetian pensioners; re-establishing the
‘‘Tskhinvali Railway’’, . . . defunct for 12 years; [and] providing free ambulatory care
and agricultural chemicals’ for local residents (Freese 2004b). On 4 June, Shida Kartli
governor Kareli ‘made his ﬁrst humanitarian mission to deliver fertilizer’ to Ossetian
villages (Freese 2004c). The humanitarian initiative was designed to ‘soften the
ground’, according to one government minister, to demonstrate to Ossetians that the
‘anti-smuggling’ ﬁght was not an oﬀensive act directed against them, just its
leadership.24
While Georgian authorities did not oﬃcially acknowledge their strategy during
the summer, they hinted at it from time to time. Security Minister Ivane
Merabishvili asserted that Kokoiti was seeking to provoke conﬂict because ‘he has
no other chance to stay in power’, elaborating that ‘people have appeared among
the ethnic Ossetians who openly criticize the Kokoiti government’s plans’. He also
drew an explicit parallel with the downfall of Abashidze’s regime in Adjara two
months before, when street protests unnerved Abashidze to the point that he took
the self-destructive move of cutting ground transport links with the rest of Georgia:
‘[Kokoiti’s] operation today is very similar to the blowing up of the bridges [in
Adjara]. We should stand as ﬁrm as we stood at the time when we did not
immediately take ‘‘appropriate steps’’’.25
Minister of Internal Aﬀairs Okruashvili,
refusing to give arms to panicked Georgian villagers, beseeched them to ‘give us a
little more time. We are handling everything according to our plan . . . [W]e are
doing everything to end this situation once and for all’.26
Limited oﬀensive or the road to a wanted war?
That Georgia had oﬀensive intentions requires us to be cautious in interpreting the
subsequent escalation as driven by a security dilemma. Georgia’s opponents regularly
accused Georgia of using the ‘war on smuggling’ as an excuse to insert high numbers
of clandestine armed forces in the region in preparation for a full-scale military
operation. They ultimately argued that the Georgians wanted to provoke the South
Ossetians into trying to attack Georgian villages, precisely to justify such an
23
At the end of May, Tea Tutberidze, a leader of the Georgian youth movement Kmara, ‘explained
that one Ossetian group, which goes by the Ossetian word for Kmara—Fagu—[had] been acting
undercover in Tskhinvali for the last month and [was] responsible for developing ties with other
frustrated branches of the Ossetian population. Tutberidze stressed that all activists were to be
Ossetian, not Georgian, and that all groups [would] develop inside Tskhinvali [to avoid] antigovernment
activities [being] rejected as a Georgian import’ (Freese 2004b). Also see IA Regnum, 24
May 2004.
24
Author’s interview (anonymous), October 2004, Tbilisi.
25
Imedi TV, 8 July 2004.
26
Rustavi-2 TV, 8 July 2004.
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oﬀensive.27
If this is true, then escalation could have been an intentional element of a
Georgian war of choice, in which case the security dilemma (which explains unwanted
wars) would not pertain. If, however, Georgia intended only limited oﬀensive action,
and did not desire broader conﬂict, then the security dilemma would be relevant, so
long as Georgia assumed such oﬀensive actions were not going to endanger its
security.
In the absence of archival evidence, it is diﬃcult to prove that an actor that appears
to be heading towards war does not really want war. Governments that want to go to
war do not always openly declare war or launch ﬁrst strikes. Sensitive to the opinion of
other states or of their own publics, they may seek war but do not want to move ﬁrst.
They may try to make war appear defensive, unwanted, and necessary, rather than
oﬀensive, desired, and optional. As Georgia’s opponents professed to believe, they
may intentionally seek escalation with the hopes of provoking the other side to strike
ﬁrst.
Georgian oﬃcials were consistent in their insistence that they had no desire to ﬁght
a war. Mirroring South Ossetian claims about Georgia, oﬃcials (like Merabishvili
above) argued throughout the conﬂict that the South Ossetians were the ones seeking
to provoke a conﬂict, threatening Georgian villages so that Georgia would strike ﬁrst,
thereby giving Russia an excuse to counterattack and take greater control of South
Ossetia.28
As the conﬂict developed, Saakashvili expressed frustration at the reluctance
of the South Ossetian authorities to negotiate a way out of the impasse and insisted the
Georgian side was oﬀering peaceful solutions to the South Ossetians:
We say, ‘Let’s talk’, and they say: ‘We’re not talking to you’, and then they say: ‘You’re
talking to us but you want military intervention’. If we did want military intervention, we
wouldn’t be talking. We wouldn’t be putting forward compromise options. If we had decided
on a military solution to the issue, there’d be no talk of ﬂexible solutions to the problems that
have built up there.29
After the South Ossetians had launched an operation to detain some Georgian
troops, Merabishvili insisted that Georgia had to avoid ‘launching a military
operation’ and becoming ‘drawn into a large-scale war’. He explained that ‘the
Russian authorities will be forced to get involved in this process’ and this would be ‘the
most dangerous thing for [Georgia] and we must avert it’. Merabishvili told reporters
that the Georgian authorities had ‘issued an order not to use arms because we did not
want to get drawn into a conﬂict’.30
Prime Minister Zurab Zhvania concurred,
asserting that ‘[b]y no means will we allow a repetition of the tragedy that,
27
For example, Russian parliamentary deputy Andrei Kokoshin, whose convoy came under ﬁre
while travelling in South Ossetia during the summer, blamed the Georgians for engaging in
provocations. ‘Indeed’, Kokoshin said, ‘all such actions are evidently geared towards getting the other
side to snap and to be the ﬁrst to undertake actions of some kind. This is one of my main impressions
from my visit’ (Ekho Moskvy Radio, 6 August 2004).
28
Imedi TV and Rustavi-2 TV, 8 July 2004. Also see Freese (2004d).
29
Imedi TV, 2 July 2004.
30
Imedi TV, 8 July 2004.
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unfortunately, we were part of in 1991. We will not allow a repetition of armed conﬂict
between Georgians and Ossetians’.31
After the ﬁrst exchanges of ﬁre, Saakashvili still insisted Georgia was not seeking a
ﬁght:
We do not need a war . . . Georgia is not a tribe of some wild natives, so to speak, who grab
their weapons as soon as the other side says something or moves. We are a state and we will
act like a state.32
Addressing a small gathering of Tbilisi-based Ossetians the next day, he elaborated:
If the Georgian government had wanted to start a war, it has had more than enough grounds
to do so. Our soldiers have been forced to go down on their knees, people have been
kidnapped, people have been wounded, and roads have been attacked. What other grounds
would have been needed if we had really wanted to start a war?33
Even in the ﬁnal days of the conﬂict, Georgia tenaciously held to this position.
Defence Minister Baramidze insisted to Russian radio that force was not an option.
Repeating the demand for ‘direct dialogue’ with South Ossetian authorities that
Georgian oﬃcials had called for throughout the summer, Baramidze insisted that
[w]e could resolve the problem of South Ossetia through the use of force today if we wanted
to. We have had suﬃcient cause for this. But, with clenched teeth, we showed restraint and
did not take the step that these separatists no doubt deserved. And we have remained loyal to
our policy of ﬁnding a solution through peaceful means.34
On 16 August, three days before the end of conﬂict, Okruashvili said that Georgia would
do [its] utmost not to . . . ﬁre a single shot, not least because the Ossetians who are dying are,
of course, our fellow citizens. Sooner or later . . . we will have to live together. So we should
do our utmost to make sure that this confrontation does not lead to a situation where it takes
years to heal our wounds.35
Such protestations of innocence do not prove conclusively that Georgia did not
desire a forcible solution to the conﬂict. However, as Saakashvili pointed out, as the
conﬂict intensiﬁed, Georgia seemed to collect enough excuses to attack if that was
what it wanted to do. When taken into consideration with Georgia’s ‘humanitarian
initiative’ and attempts to mobilise the local Ossetian population against its own
31
Minister of Internal Aﬀairs Irakli Okruashvili made similar remarks. For the remarks of both
Zhvania and Okruashvili, see Rustavi-2 TV, 8 July 2004.
32
Rustavi-2 TV, 10 July 2004.
33
Rustavi-2 TV, 11 July 2004.
34
Radio Mayak (Moscow), 11 August 2004. Saakashvili added that ‘[w]e must thwart the plans
drawn up by external forces to drag Georgia into a large-scale armed conﬂict on its own territory. We
do not need this conﬂict. We intend to unify the country peacefully’ (Imedi TV, 12 August 2004).
35
Rustavi-2 TV, 16 August 2004.
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regime, such denials take on even greater plausibility; it would have been exceptionally
cynical for Georgia to pursue war secretly while openly courting the local population.
In sum, we do not know for certain that Georgia was not preparing to ﬁght for South
Ossetia, but the evidence suggests it was not.
Motivating the oﬀensive?
Ascertaining intentions is not the same thing as determining the motivations that drive
them. If oﬀensive intentions can be motivated by insecurity or ambition, all the more
can limited oﬀensive intentions have diverse motivations. Conceivably, Georgia’s
limited oﬀensive intentions were driven solely by inland insecurity. Geography made it
diﬃcult to monitor the South Ossetian border from the outside. Short of utilising ‘an
entire army’ for border monitoring (as one government minister put it), South Ossetia
remained a highly porous region in which goods and people could enter and exit freely
through the Roki tunnel at the South Ossetian–Russian border, one of only two main
entry points for vehicle traﬃc into Georgia from Russia, or by using bypass roads that
could be built as fast as the Georgian authorities destroyed them.36
Only by moving
onto the main arteries close to and within South Ossetia—including the central road
north of Tskhinvali—could Georgia really deter contraband and monitor traﬃc
passing through the region.
This line of thinking could have led even to a decision to depose the South Ossetian
regime. A limited strategy of inserting armed forces and locking down transit traﬃc
within the conﬂict zone was not a viable security strategy in the long-term because it
contained the potential for violent conﬂict. The only stable way to provide for
Georgia’s inland security was to control South Ossetia’s border crossing with Russia,
at the Roki tunnel, which would ensure full oversight of traﬃc coming through South
Ossetia. The South Ossetian authorities ﬁrmly opposed this, however, as it would be
seen as a signiﬁcant step toward legitimising Georgian sovereignty over South Ossetia.
Given Ossetian resistance, Georgia was seemingly faced with the choice, in pursuit of
inland security, of either tolerating sustained conﬂict as Ossetians attempted to
dislodge Georgian checkpoints in the region or attempting to depose the leadership
and establish a more pliant regime.
Unfortunately, it is not easy to determine whether the Georgian leadership was
thinking along these lines, or whether it was motivated mainly by more abstract
notions of state security qua territorial integrity, or simply by ambitions of territorial
restoration. One piece of evidence that at least suggests other motivations were present
is that the Georgian government was aware of other strategies it could have employed
if inland security was indeed its sole concern. Recognising the potential for escalation
inherent in inserting troops into the conﬂict zone, the local mission of the Organisation
for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), responsible for monitoring the
peace, had directly discussed with the government the prospect of posting ‘anticontraband’
checkpoints on roads located outside the conﬂict zone, something which
OSCE oﬃcials had thought was an ‘excellent idea’, according to one international
36
Author’s interview (anonymous), October 2004, Tbilisi.
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NGO worker involved in the discussions.37
While such an option might have been less
eﬀective than stationing troops within the conﬂict zone, Georgian oﬃcials did not
know just how less eﬀective a ‘second-best’ option of tightening border controls
outside the conﬂict zone would be.
One reasonwhy Georgiadidnotattemptsuchan approachreﬂectsanabstractconcern
for state security. The Georgian government had a longstanding policy, predating the
Rose Revolution, of not oﬃcially establishing customs and security checkpoints at the de
facto border with South Ossetia, as oﬃcials believed this would help harden the border
between South Ossetia and Georgia. This, the Georgians feared, would imply
recognition of South Ossetian independence and help predetermine a political outcome
to conﬂict that would not reunite South Ossetia to Georgia. So while it might have been
possible to tighten the border from points outside the conﬂict zone, this option may have
been rejected due to a concern about what such an approach would mean, symbolically
and practically, for Georgia’s claim to sovereignty over South Ossetia.
Of course, South Ossetian separatism also represented a more traditional security
threat. It aﬀected Georgian security vis-a`-vis Russia, a far greater adversary than
South Ossetia itself. Georgian authorities stressed as a matter of course that Russia
had ‘complete control over South Ossetia . . . prop[ping it up] by ﬁnancing pensions,
government salaries, and security forces, and by providing Russian passports and
residency documents to South Ossetians’ (Freese 2004e). At the leadership level,
Kokoiti was propped up by the Russian military intelligence and security apparatuses
(GRU and FSB). According to a senior Georgian intelligence oﬃcial in 2004, South
Ossetia’s de facto minister of defence was a former GRU oﬃcer, while the chairman of
its state security committee was from the FSB.38
A senior defence oﬃcial added that
‘law enforcement in South Ossetia is done by the Russians’.39
In fact, the intelligence
oﬃcial said, ‘Kokoiti is [just] the face’ of a far deeper Russian authority in the
region.40
Georgian insecurity thus stemmed not only from the fact of South Ossetian
37
Author’s interview (anonymous), October 2004, Tbilisi. Other alternatives, at least to partially
address Georgian border concerns, were also conceivable. Aleko Kupatadze, co-author of a study on
smuggling in South Ossetia and Abkhazia (Kukhianidze et al. 2004), suggested that, rather than
enforce a blockade, Georgia could have reduced excise taxes on the most commonly smuggled goods—
ﬂour, cigarettes and fuel. It also could have imported more ﬂour legally, dropping the price of ﬂour and
making the import of contraband ﬂour less proﬁtable for Russian companies sending truckloads of
ﬂour to sell in South Ossetia and Georgia on the cheap, paying only nominal customs fees/bribes to
Ossetian oﬃcials. (Author’s interviews with Aleko Kupatadze, October 2004, Tbilisi.)
38
Author’s interview, October 2004, Tbilisi. Anatoly Barankevich was South Ossetia’s de facto
minister of defence from July 2004. In December 2006, he was appointed secretary of South Ossetia’s
security council. He was previously Russia’s ﬁrst deputy military commissioner in Chechnya and in the
Stavropol region. From at least December 2004 until March 2006, the South Ossetian KGB chairman
was Anatoly Yarovoi, formerly regional head of the FSB in the Russian republic of Mordovia. These
were joined in July 2005 by Yuri Morozov, South Ossetia’s de facto prime minister (until he was
removed after the 2008 war), who hails from the Russian republic of Bashkortostan (Rustavi-2 TV, 17
January 2005; Interfax (Moscow), 18 January 2005; ‘Russian Oﬃcials in Georgia Separatist
Governments’, Georgia Update, Government of Georgia, 21 September 2008, available at: http://
georgiaupdate.gov.ge/en/doc/10006631/Annex%202%20Russian%20oﬃcials.pdf, accessed September
2008).
39
Author’s interview (anonymous), October 2004, Tbilisi.
40
Author’s interview (anonymous), October 2004, Tbilisi.
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separatism but from a signiﬁcantly more powerful adversary, Russia, which could use
the region as a base to further weaken Georgia with the aim of returning it to the
Russian sphere of inﬂuence, or at least formalising South Ossetia’s secession. To
Georgians, restoring sovereignty over South Ossetia was inseparable from ensuring
state security.
At the same time, an explanation for Georgia’s actions rooted in ambition rather
than security is also conceivable. Bolstered by their conﬁdence in coming to power and
the ease of their victory in Adjara, the Georgian government and Mikheil Saakashvili
in particular may have desired more ‘revolutionary’ successes for reasons of regime
and personal legitimacy, while committed to the ideal of restoring Georgia’s territorial
integrity. This alone may have motivated the authorities to launch a limited, primarily
non-violent, oﬀensive to wrest control of South Ossetia from its separatist authorities
and return it to Georgia, regardless of the possible eﬀects of such a move on Georgian
security.
In the end, it is diﬃcult to identify precisely the motivations behind Georgia’s
actions. Georgia’s limited oﬀensive actions in South Ossetia could have been
motivated by ‘inland’ insecurity. If so, they were equally driven by a motivation to
avoid steps that would further separate South Ossetia from Georgia, a motivation that
could be ascribed to an abstract notion of state security and one reinforced by
perceptions of the Russian threat. It is also possible, however, that claims of insecurity
obscured more ambitious motivations to restore lost territory. In the end, Georgian
oﬃcials themselves may have had diﬃculty discerning their prime motivation for
seeking to reclaim South Ossetia.
The internal security dilemma at work
Whatever the combination of intentions and motivations that leads an actor to a
security dilemma, the escalation that unfolds is a variation on a theme: an actor takes
measures that reduce the security of another actor, that actor responds with actions
(or rhetoric) that make the ﬁrst actor insecure, and the cycle recurs. This mutual
insecurity is said to be magniﬁed in an internal security dilemma, in part because of
heightened uncertainty regarding an opponent’s intentions. Such uncertainty is at
least partially due to the ‘rudimentary’ nature of the weaponry that is often used in
such conﬂicts, which makes diﬀerentiating between oﬀensive and defensive
capabilities more diﬃcult than in inter-state conﬂict (Posen 1993, p. 29). We can
add to this the point made in the previous section: that the reduced signiﬁcance of
borders in internal conﬂicts promotes the indistinguishability of oﬀensive and
defensive action.
Most analyses of the security dilemma in internal conﬂicts also focus on the
increased vulnerabilities of internal conﬂicts produced by ‘islands’ of ethnic settlement
(Posen 1993; Van Evera 1994, pp. 38–41; Kaufmann 1996, pp. 147–49). These ‘islands’
are populations ‘distributed across the nominal territory of another group’ in such a
way as to be vulnerable to attack (Posen 1993, p. 32). As such, they increase the ﬁrststrike
incentives for both parties. The presence of such ‘islands’ can encourage
ethnically-related kin, uncertain of the intentions of the group surrounding the
‘islands’, to take oﬀensive action to protect them. At the same time, groups
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surrounding ethnic ‘islands’, uncertain of the intentions of the latter’s kin, might also
fear attack and so take (or threaten) pre-emptive action against them (Posen 1993, pp.
32–33; Kaufmann 1996, p. 148). Finally, though they are not typically treated as such
in analyses of security dilemmas, external actors that support one or the other side can
also make an ‘internal’ security dilemma more acute. In the case of conﬂicts where a
secessionist actor has an outside supporter, the latter can heighten the capacity of the
secessionist actor to respond to a state’s initial actions; magnify the insecurity to the
state caused by that response; or encourage the state to perceive the response as
unambiguously oﬀensive and, hence, requiring armed response.41
Given these elaborations, a ‘structural’ security dilemma largely appears to explain
the unfolding of escalation in the 2004 conﬂict in South Ossetia. Uncertainty about
Georgian intentions prompted South Ossetian authorities to employ rhetoric and take
actions that threatened Georgian villages. In turn, Georgian uncertainty about South
Ossetian intentions prompted Georgian authorities to shore up their defences of
Georgian villages and establish a secure road to move men and supplies in and, if
necessary, villagers out. This, in turn, threatened the South Ossetians, since Tskhinvali
was nearly surrounded by Georgian villages and because the main road to Russia,
Tskhinvali’s ‘lifeline’ for food, equipment, reinforcement, and evacuation, ran straight
through the Georgian villages to its north. Ossetians thus counterattacked to push
Georgian troops out of their new positions and to prevent them from securing even
more advantageous positions on the heights surrounding Tskhinvali. Meanwhile,
Russian support increased South Ossetian conﬁdence and deterrence capabilities while
greatly enlarging the Georgian perception of oﬀensive threat. The escalation that
unfolded was driven by a security dilemma: what Georgians (and, for that matter,
South Ossetians) did to enhance their security caused reactions that made them
increasingly less secure.
That said, we must be wary of employing too mechanistic a model of escalation.
Security-dilemma analyses tend to shy away from arguing that structural features
determine action. Reactions and counter-reactions are not necessarily the actions of
uncertain and vulnerable actors hedging their bets, but of actors who employ a variety
of decision-making mechanisms and shortcuts in an eﬀort to actually divine an
opponent’s intentions and react appropriately. Such processes can produce actions
that would not necessarily have been taken if actors were operating on the basis of
structural conditions alone.
How structural and perceptual factors interact to produce escalation is something
that has been explored only partially in the study of internal conﬂicts. The
dominant focus has been on how national identity and historical understandings
inform decisions in the context of uncertainty. Posen (1993, pp. 30–31), for
example, argued that actors in internal conﬂict use historical behaviour as a
shortcut ‘to assess the oﬀensive implications’ of group solidarity. Other authors
41
While Posen (1993, p. 32) considered the role of external supporters, he viewed them as having
mainly a stabilising eﬀect, to ‘deter would-be aggressors [against ethnic islands] by threatening to
retaliate in one way or another’. He said nothing about external actors that support ‘would-be
aggressors’ against ethnic islands. On the role of external actors in secessionist conﬂicts, also see
Saideman (2001).
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(Van Evera 1994, pp. 44–52; Lemarchand 1996; Arﬁ 1998; Kaufman 2001; Petersen
2002) have elaborated on how historical behaviour and myths about the nature and
past behaviour of one’s own group and others can fuel security-dilemma escalation.
By comparison, psychological explanations for escalation unrelated to issues of
identity and history remain under-investigated. Robert Jervis, the scholar who
pioneered the systematic study of the security dilemma, conducted much of the
groundbreaking work in this ﬁeld. His treatment of the cognitive sources of
perception and misperception (Jervis 1968, 1976) oﬀers an intermediary between
structure and action in internal conﬂict that is as appropriate as that provided by
theories of identity and memory.
Indeed, the escalation of conﬂict in South Ossetia in 2004 did not grow organically
out of structural features, even with the addition of well-formulated historical myths
and memories that Georgians and Ossetians could (and, in some instances, did) invoke
while attempting to assess the other side’s intentions. Instead, it was triggered by a
rapid overnight deployment of special forces troops into the South Ossetian conﬂict
zone, a factor that cannot be explained on the basis of uncertainty, vulnerability,
history and identity alone. This deployment was an over-reaction to a Russian threat
to eliminate Georgian checkpoints that had its roots in organisational (mis)behaviour
more than in uncertainty and group insecurity. South Ossetians and Russians
interpreted the signiﬁcance of this action in a manner consistent with psychological
theories of perception that argue that actors in conﬂict tend to reject accident or
disorganisation as an explanation for their opponents’ behaviour, especially when that
behaviour appears to reﬂect oﬀensive intent. In turn, Georgians interpreted the South
Ossetian and Russian response also in a psychologically predictable fashion—by
presuming that, even given the ambiguous signals they had accidentally emitted, the
other side would be able to discern the limited intentions the Georgians themselves
knew they held. Heightened uncertainty and vulnerability may have provided the
context for security-dilemma escalation, but blunders and cognitive misperceptions
drove it forward.
A conﬂict takes shape (31 May–6 July)
Early on 31 May, Georgia took the step which most proximately triggered
escalation to armed conﬂict—the deployment of several hundred interior ministry
troops and security forces to four checkpoints within the South Ossetian conﬂict
zone (three of which were outside South Ossetia proper).42
After the South
Ossetian authorities and Russian-led peacekeeping forces issued protests, Georgia
agreed to withdraw the extra troops, but nevertheless, they established a ‘special
headquarters’ within the conﬂict zone (albeit outside South Ossetia) in the village
of Tkviavi (Freese 2004b). In addition, Saakashvili announced that Georgia would
increase the number of legal Georgian troops in the region by increasing its
42
Georgian oﬃcials said that 300 Georgian interior ministry troops were involved, while the South
Ossetian authorities claimed the total was 700 members of the interior forces, and an additional 200
personnel (Interfax, 31 May 2004; RIA Novosti, 1 June 2004).
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contingent in the Joint Peacekeeping Force (JPF) from 90 to the full 500
permissible.43
On 6 June, Georgia dispatched its ﬁrst new set of 150 peacekeeping
troops to the Didi Liakhvi gorge.44
The South Ossetian authorities, joined by Russia, swiftly and clearly responded with
rhetoric and actions aimed to deter Georgia from initiating any hostilities. After the 31
May deployment, Kokoiti accused Georgia of preparing a large-scale military
operation and warned that ‘the armed forces of South Ossetia have been ordered to
destroy any aircraft or regiments that cross the border of South Ossetia’.45
Entering
the fray a day later, the Russian Ministry of Foreign Aﬀairs issued the ﬁrst of a stream
of stern communique´ s, warning Georgia that its actions could ‘lead to the most dire
and unpredictable consequences’. In case Tbilisi failed to understand, the ministry
added that Georgia ‘should be aware of the gravity of the situation now obtaining’
and would be fully responsible for any ‘violence and bloodshed’ that might occur.46
Words were coupled with action: Georgian oﬃcials announced two days later that
some tens of vehicles containing military supplies and weapons had crossed the
Russian border into South Ossetia.47
To Georgians, who were in fact not mobilising for military action, these words and
movements were a wholly disproportionate response to their actions, indicating to them
the South Ossetians’ and Russians’ own hostile intent. As a result, they responded with
their own deterrence and took additional defensive measures which, in turn, threatened
the South Ossetians. Georgian Minister of Internal Aﬀairs Okruashvili said that Georgia
reserved the right to send ‘even more forces’ into the region, as Georgian forces began to
make operational a rugged ‘bypass road’ skirting Tskhinvali and linking the ethnic
Georgian villages of Patara Liakhvi and Didi Liakhvi.48
The South Ossetian authorities
complained that Georgian forces were establishing a blockade of Ossetian border
villages, preventing residents from bringing in basic necessities.49
Indeed, at the time the
local Georgian authorities and security oﬃcials were ‘man[ning] contraband checkpoints
and roadsall dayandparticularlyatnightwhentraﬃcking[was]atits highest’.Theywere
‘dig[ging] trenches into smuggling roads’ and following smugglers across ﬁelds. ‘We are
working entirely on this issue now’, one oﬃcial noted, ‘and we haven’t slept in four days’
(Freese 2004d). Tensions increased as a result of a series of arrests and counter-arrests in
the last weeks of June; in all, Okruashvili ‘counted 40 disappearances or short-term
detentions’ on the Georgian side (Freese 2005, p. 114).50
43
Georgian State Television Channel One, 31 May 2004.
44
Rustavi-2 TV, 3 June 2004; Kavkasia-Press, 6 June 2004.
45
Interfax, 31 May 2004. Also see ITAR-TASS, 10 June 2004.
46
Press Release, ‘On the Situation Around South Ossetia’, Ministry of the Foreign Aﬀairs of the
Russian Federation, 1 June 2004, available at: http://www.ln.mid.ru/brp_4.nsf/sps/7D63CF5CE50
19AEEC3256EA7003CCC7E, accessed November 2007.
47
An aide to the commander of Russia’s North Caucasus Military District acknowledged that
military trucks had come across the border, although he said they were carrying only routine supplies.
The Russian Ministry of Defence denied any military transit into South Ossetia (NTV (Moscow),
ITAR-TASS and Interfax, 12 June 2004).
48
Imedi TV, 12 and 14 June 2004; IA Regnum, 14 June 2004.
49
IA Regnum, 22 and 27 June 2004.
50
On the arrests, see IA Regnum, 14 and 30 June 2004; Kavkasia-Press, 23 June 2004; Imedi TV, 22,
24 and 29 June 2004; Rustavi-2 TV, 30 June 2004; RIA Novosti, 1 July 2004; ITAR-TASS, 3 July 2004.
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These detentions occurred against a backdrop of heightened Ossetian agitation
against Georgian intervention. On 26 June, Kokoiti issued an order to establish
checkpoints around Georgian villages.51
The next day,
armed Ossetians blocked village roads for several hours [while] Ossetian forces intensiﬁed
military training exercises in [the Patara Liakhvi village of Prisi] in what locals describe[d] as
an intimidating show of force . . . [Meanwhile,] Ossetians reportedly continue[d] to dig
trenches around their capital and allow unauthorized armed persons to ‘defend’ Ossetian
villages. (Freese 2004d)
On 2 July, Kokoiti called on local Georgians to ‘rebuﬀ . . . instigators and force out
illegal armed formations from your villages’.52
Escalation to armed conﬂict (7 July–31 July)
At this stage, though a cycle of insecurity and mutual suspicion was well underway, the
situation still seemed far from armed conﬂict. At a 6 July meeting of the Russian–
Georgian–Ossetian Joint Control Commission (JCC), tasked since 1992 with
guaranteeing the continued cessation of hostilities in the region, the South Ossetian
representative indicated that both sides had agreed to dismantle all newly established
checkpoints. He said that South Ossetians had already removed theirs from around
Georgian villages, while the Georgians had agreed to remove their reinforcements
within two days.53
This seeming opportunity for de-escalation was quickly lost, however, with the
discovery of ongoing armament. ‘In the early hours of 7 July, Georgian peacekeepers,
police, and local authorities’ in Didi Liakhvi apprehended ‘nine Russian vehicles
carrying military equipment to Russian peacekeepers based in Tskhinvali’ (Freese
2004e). In two of them, the Georgians uncovered 300 unguided missiles for use in
helicopters. Georgian oﬃcials conﬁscated the trucks, oﬀering to return the weapons to
Russia, but not in South Ossetia.54
Furious at Georgia’s interference, South Ossetian authorities, again joined by
Russia, shifted from trying to deter the Georgians from launching hostilities to
compelling them to eliminate their armed presence outside the JPF contingent and,
especially, the new Georgian positions linking the villages of Didi and Patara Liakhvi.
South Ossetian forces followed Georgian troops as they removed the conﬁscated
vehicles down the bypass road to Patara Liakhvi, and set up position on surrounding
territory above the bypass road and local Georgian-populated villages.55
The Ossetian
51
ITAR-TASS, 26 June 2004.
52
NTV Mir (Moscow), 2 July 2004.
53
ITAR-TASS, 6 July 2004; Kavkasia-Press, 6 July 2004.
54
They ﬁrst oﬀered the conﬁscated weapons to the Russian military headquarters in Tbilisi, which
refused to accept them. They were eventually returned at the Georgian–Russian border (RIA Novosti, 7
July 2004; Rustavi-2 TV, 7 and 11 July 2004; Radio Mayak, 12 July 2004; Channel One TV (Moscow), 7
and 24 July 2004).
55
Rustavi-2 TV, 7 July 2004; brieﬁng by OSCE military advisor, OSCE Mission to Georgia
(Tskhinvali oﬃce), October 2004. Also see Freese (2004e).
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JPF commander now announced that he could not be responsible for the actions of
any Ossetian forces who were not peacekeepers (Freese 2004e). As Prisi, the closest
Georgian-populated village to Tskhinvali ‘began to evacuate’ (Freese 2004e), Kokoiti
announced that South Ossetia would take further measures ‘to prevent the entry of
armed groups from Georgia to areas not under the control of the peacekeeping force’.
He warned:
[I]n Tbilisi they do not think about the fate of residents of [the] Georgian-populated villages
of South Ossetia . . . [I] conﬁrm my order not to open ﬁre on these settlements as long as there
are no armed groups there, and to ensure [the] security of [the] peaceful Georgian population.
At the same time, I once again call on my Georgian compatriots to expel groups of armed
bandits from their villages irrespective of the uniform they wear. Do not let them turn your
land into a battleground and ignite a new ﬂame of war.56
The Russian Minister of Defence went so far as to state that Georgia’s actions gave
Russia
the full right to take appropriate actions . . . It is too early to disclose the content of these
actions. But I can say that they will make the Georgian forces reluctant to try the patience of
our peacekeepers in South Ossetia and check them for strength once and for all.57
The next day, South Ossetian armed forces moved against Georgian internal
security troops, detaining over 40 in the Patara Liakhvi village of Vanati. The troops
surrendered without a ﬁght and were taken to Tskhinvali where they were put on
public display, kneeling with their hands behind their heads surrounded by South
Ossetian forces.58
Accusing the Georgians of ‘trying to pretend that all armed people
[in the region] are peacekeepers’, regional authorities said there were at least 2,000
irregular Georgian armed forces in the region and noted that operations to detain
them were being held in other villages as well.59
Kokoiti insisted that the operation ‘in
no way means that South Ossetia is trying to provoke a war. Quite the opposite, we
are trying to make Georgia start implementing obligations that it has taken on
earlier’.60
For Georgia, however, the detention underlined the fact that by this time Georgians
faced an entirely diﬀerent—and far less secure—context than that in which they had
begun their South Ossetian operation. Georgian authorities now began to reframe
their activity in the region from being part of a ‘war on smuggling’ to a more
conventionally defensive operation. After the policemen were detained, Georgian
Prime Minister Zurab Zhvania announced:
The main thing we must make clear to everyone . . . is that one of the plans Kokoiti and his
entourage . . . are considering envisages an attack on Georgian villages . . . [T]he authorities
56
Rustavi-2 TV, 7 July 2004.
57
ITAR-TASS, 7 July 2004.
58
Channel One TV and Rustavi-2 TV, 8 July 2004.
59
RIA Novosti and NTV Mir, 8 July 2004.
60
Tsentr-TV (Moscow), 8 July 2004.
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of Georgia have absolutely all means at their disposal—and these are very serious means—to
deliver an appropriate response to any violence.61
While most of the detained Georgian forces were released in two days, the tensions
led to a rapid escalation of armed forces. The South Ossetian authorities announced
they were accepting ‘volunteers’ from the North Caucasus and elsewhere to help
defend South Ossetia against Georgian ‘aggression’.62
After the Ossetian forces
blocked the bypass road and dug trenches around Georgian villages, the latter’s
inhabitants began to panic
and called on authorities to defend them or provide them with arms, and evacuate [them]
increasingly rapidly . . . [T]he Georgian interior ministry deployed [more] troops to the region
and organized villagers into groups of ﬁfteen to twenty persons and provided them with arms
to defend villages. (Freese 2004e)63
Acknowledging the insertion of extra troops, State Minister for Conﬂict Resolution
Giorgi Khaindrava argued that Georgia was sending in ‘[o]nly those . . . necessary to
ease tensions’.64
A senior defence oﬃcial later conﬁrmed that Georgia had decided to
increase its armed presence in the region after the detention of the policemen. It was at
this time, he said, that Georgian soldiers ﬁrst entered South Ossetia outside the
peacekeeping framework.65
This escalation precipitated the ﬁrst violent clashes of the summer between
Ossetians and Georgians. On the day of the detention, a ﬁre-ﬁght between Ossetian
and Georgian troops occurred near Tamarasheni, a Georgian village in Didi Liakhvi
on the outskirts of Tskhinvali.66
The next evening, Ossetians and Georgians engaged
in another ﬁre-ﬁght on the outskirts of the village of Prisi, as Ossetians accused
Georgians of trying to occupy a strategic hill.67
In response, the Georgians set up a
‘coordination’ centre within South Ossetia proper, in Eredvi.68
Other ﬁre-ﬁghts
occurred near Nikozi, another Georgian village, and again near Tamarasheni.69
Out of nowhere, war loomed. On 11 July, South Ossetian oﬃcials reported that 300
volunteers from the North Caucasus and elsewhere had arrived in the region. Kokoiti
ordered ‘all units to be in high combat readiness and to suppress the adversary’s ﬁre
units . . . We shall crush these bandits’ formations, destroy them and strike the
points . . . where the Georgian military equipment is concentrated’.70
The following
61
Imedi TV, 8 July 2004.
62
RIA Novosti, 8 July 2004; Channel One TV, 9 July 2004; NTV Mir, 11 July 2004.
63
On 9 July, Russian peacekeepers reported that they had stopped tens of Georgian vehicles from
moving across the South Ossetian border. However, some 150 Georgian forces reportedly managed to
slip into the region nonetheless (NTV Mir, 9 July 2004).
64
NTV Mir, 8 July 2004.
65
Author’s interview (anonymous), October 2004, Tbilisi.
66
ITAR-TASS, Rustavi-2 TV, 8 July 2004.
67
NTV and RIA Novosti, 10 July 2004. Also see Freese (2004e).
68
Rustavi-2 TV, 10 July 2004.
69
Channel One TV, 9 July 2004; RTR Russia TV (Moscow), Mze TV (Tbilisi) and ITAR-TASS, 10
July 2004. Also see Freese (2004e).
70
NTV, 11 July 2004.
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day, South Ossetia held military exercises with the participation of what regional
authorities said was at least 1,000 volunteers, not only from the North Caucasus but
also from two other secessionist regions, Abkhazia and Moldovan Transdniestria.71
The Georgians also continued to increase their armed presence in the region. On 15
July, the South Ossetian authorities accused Georgia of inserting up to 800 more
troops into the region.72
The next day, Russian peacekeeping forces reported that
Georgia had ‘almost doubled the strength of its police’ and that unidentiﬁed troops in
Eredvi, possessing ammunition stores and military vehicles labelled as peacekeeping
vehicles, were denying the JPF the right to investigate.73
After Georgian forces
conﬁscated a Russian anti-tank system on 18 July, Saakashvili responded that Georgia
had no intention of withdrawing its forces from South Ossetia.74
Georgian and Ossetian troops exchanged ﬁre several more times before the end of
July, with gunﬁre reaching Tskhinvali and even the JPF headquarters.75
By the end of
the month, ‘a total of nine Georgian civilians and troops [had] been wounded, and one
killed . . . Georgian oﬃcials report[ed] that Ossetian authorities [would] not conﬁrm
the number of casualties on their side’ (Freese 2004f).76
Arguing for holding their
positions in the Didi Liakhvi and Patara Liakhvi gorges, Saakashvili made an
impassioned case for the need to protect Georgian villagers:
Shall we withdraw the hardware as some paciﬁsts want us to do? Shall we withdraw our
policemen from there? Whom shall we place our conﬁdence in? [JPF commander Sviatoslav]
Nabzdorov? Or those Russian oﬃcers who do everything to occupy all these territories? . . .
[T]hey want to remove residents from the entire territory . . . [O]n the contrary, we will
reinforce [Georgian villages] as much as possible . . . I say directly that we will not withdraw
no matter how much they talk to us. These villages will be protected.77
Moving towards war (1 August–13 August)
In August, the escalation entered a new phase. On 1 August, Okruashvili declared that
‘[a]ll [Ossetian] attacks will be repelled, although we will not open ﬁre ﬁrst . . .
[W]henever there is a provocation from their side, we will respond accordingly’.78
On 9
71
NTV Mir, 15 July 2004; ITAR-TASS, 13 July 2004; Imedi TV, 12, 15 and 19 July 2004; Rustavi-2
TV, 18 July 2004.
72
NTV Mir, ITAR-TASS and Imedi TV, 15 July 2004.
73
ITAR-TASS and Channel One TV, 16 July 2004; RTR Russia, 17 July 2004.
74
Saakashvili justiﬁed his decision by drawing on Georgia’s experience in the 1992–1993 war in
Abkhazia, noting that ‘once they made us withdraw our force from Gagra, and it ended badly. Then
they made us withdraw our force from Sukhumi. We all know how it ended’ (Imedi TV, 20 July 2004).
75
On these incidents, see Ekho Moskvy Radio, 19 July 2004; RTR Russia TV, 18 July 2004; KavkasiaPress,
23 July 2004; ITAR-TASS, 28 and 29 July 2004; Rustavi-2 TV, 28 July 2004; Tsentr-TV, 30 July
2004.
76
Okruashvili announced that in one battle in Patara Liakhvi on 31 July, six Ossetians were killed
(although the South Ossetian authorities denied this) (Kavkasia-Press, 1 August 2004; Interfax, 2
August 2004).
77
Imedi TV and Rustavi-2 TV, 20 July 2004.
78
Kavkasia-Press, 1 August 2004. A senior defence oﬃcial later asserted that the soldiers who had
gone to the region had received ‘very clear rules of engagement not to conduct oﬀensive actions’.
Soldiers were to use their weapons ‘only in case of a threat to [their] lives’ (author’s interview
(anonymous), October 2004, Tbilisi).
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August, Saakashvili said that interior forces were being withdrawn to make way for ‘a
smaller but better trained contingent’, made up of troops who had graduated from the
US-funded Georgian Train and Equip (GTEP) military assistance programme,
established after 11 September 2001 to bolster Georgia’s counterterrorism abilities
(German 2004; Giragosian 2004; Welt 2005b). These forces, Saakashvili said, were ‘far
more disciplined and experienced, and they have been ordered not to return ﬁre as
much as possible’.79
The South Ossetian JCC representative insisted that while
Georgian army troops were entering the region, interior troops were still not leaving
and between 2,000 and 3,000 Georgian forces continued to operate outside the
conﬁnes of the peacekeeping mission.80
Okruashvili admitted that the Georgian police
presence in villages had been strengthened ‘to ensure the security of residents’.81
According to another government minister interviewed after the events, Georgia
inserted approximately 1,000 armed troops into South Ossetia in all, in addition to the
500-strong peacekeeping contingent.82
Exchanges of ﬁre continued almost nightly from 5 to 13 August, threatening to turn
the skirmish ‘into a full-scale conﬂict’ (Freese 2004g). Early on 11 August, Tskhinvali
came under sustained ﬁre. The next day, the Georgians accused the Ossetians of
initiating a heavy attack on the villages of Didi Liakhvi and seeking ‘to take control of
the bypass road’ that led to them. In the ensuing ﬁre-ﬁght, at least three Georgian
soldiers were killed.83
The Ossetian authorities argued that Georgians, including
members of their peacekeeping contingent, were responsible, and that Georgian
shelling had destroyed more than 50 homes, as well as a hospital and kindergarten in
Tskhinvali. They also said that hundreds of new Georgian special forces and internal
troops were massing at the South Ossetian border.84
In turn, Georgian Prime Minister
Zhvania argued that the Georgians were compelled to defend themselves against
South Ossetian attacks aiming to block oﬀ Georgian villages in Didi Liakhvi because,
if successful, these attacks would result in ‘large-scale ethnic cleansing’. Saakashvili
added that the Georgian government would ‘do everything possible to ensure that
civilians are protected and that no one can drive them out’.85
Nonetheless, that day
Georgian ‘women, children, and . . . elderly began to evacuate by car and on foot in
large numbers, carrying only what they could in their hands’ (Freese 2004g). The next
day, heavy artillery ﬁre started up again in the direction of Eredvi, and the convoy of
Prime Minister Zhvania, who had spent the night in the conﬂict zone, came under ﬁre
as it headed out of the region.86
In response, Saakashvili warned that Georgians ‘have
no illusions about the peace process . . . We of course should follow [it] but we will not
make fools of ourselves. Only we can help ourselves. Every resident of our country
79
ITAR-TASS, 9 August 2004; author’s interview (anonymous), October 2004, Tbilisi.
80
ITAR-TASS, 5 and 6 August 2004.
81
Kavkasia-Press, 6 August 2004.
82
Author’s interview (anonymous), October 2004, Tbilisi.
83
Imedi TV, 12 August 2004. Also see ITAR-TASS and Agence France Press, 12 August 2004;
Kommersant, 13 August 2004.
84
RIA Novosti and Interfax, 12 August 2004.
85
Imedi TV, 12 August 2004. Also see Rustavi-2 TV, 13 August 2004.
86
RIA Novosti and Imedi TV, 13 August 2004.
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should know this . . . Impudence has its limits’.87
That evening, Ossetian ﬁre mortally
wounded a Georgian soldier; the next day, Russian peacekeepers ceded control of a
road leading to two Georgian villages to Ossetian troops.88
War ﬁnally approached as the defensive position of Georgian troops protecting
villages and strategic passes became unsustainable. On 16 August, when two more
Georgian soldiers lost their lives defending their positions, Okruashvili announced
that Georgia had had enough and was prepared to go to war to protect its troops:
Until last night we exercised maximum restraint and did not take active retaliatory steps
because we thought that there was still a chance for peace . . . [But] this is no longer a country
that will turn a blind eye to the loss of life among its citizens.
While he announced that if a ceaseﬁre held for three days, Georgia would begin to
withdraw its soldiers, he also declared, ‘I want to make clear that we are not going to
abandon our positions and accept a situation where one or two of our soldiers are
wounded or killed every day. This will have to end sooner or later’.89
Three days later, it did. After the death of another Georgian serviceman, the
Georgian and South Ossetian authorities came to a peculiar understanding, blaming a
mysterious ‘third force’ for disrupting the ceaseﬁre and agreeing to take joint action
against it.90
Fire-ﬁghts continued, however, and on the night of 18–19 August,
Georgian forces attacked and occupied strategic heights above Tskhinvali, reporting
three Georgian fatalities and claiming that ‘only Russians’ had been on the heights,
with eight Cossack volunteers killed.91
This manoeuvre proved to be the last of the
conﬂict. Saakashvili promptly insisted that Georgian forces did not wish to remain in
their new positions as this could ‘lead to the beginning of a major military conﬂict’. He
agreed to hand over the heights to JPF control and to withdraw all Georgian troops
from South Ossetia outside its 500-strong peacekeeping contingent.92
If Georgian
forces had not withdrawn, their new position would have greatly increased the threat
to South Ossetians, leading to retaliatory attacks that almost certainly would have led
to war.
An anomalous trigger: escalation revisited
Whatever Georgia’s original intentions and motivations, its South Ossetian operation
was marked by a process of security-dilemma escalation. This escalation appeared
87
Rustavi-2 TV, 13 August 2004.
88
Rustavi-2 TV, 14 August 2004.
89
Rustavi-2 TV, 16 August 2004.
90
On the ‘third force’, Georgian First Deputy Minister of Security Gigi Ugulava said that this
consisted of Cossack volunteers and members of the North Ossetian peacekeeping battalion and that in
using the phrase, the Georgian government was trying to ‘leave the Ossetian side a way out’. In return,
South Ossetia’s de facto Minister of Defence Anatoly Barankevich said that Georgian troops were
ﬁring on each other (ITAR-TASS, RIA Novosti, Interfax and Imedi TV, 17 August 2004; Georgian
State Television Channel One and Rustavi-2 TV, 18 August 2004). On Cossack involvement, also see
RIA Novosti and Nezavisimaya Gazeta (Moscow), 18 August 2004.
91
Interfax, TASS and Rustavi-2 TV, 19 August 2004.
92
TASS, 19 August 2004.
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mechanical, as Georgians and South Ossetians acted in fear of the other’s intentions.
By reducing the security of South Ossetians, Georgia increased the vulnerability of
ethnic Georgians in the conﬂict zone, as well as that of the armed forces defending
those civilians and Georgia’s strategic positions. The more Georgia sought to defend
its people and positions, the more threatening Georgian forces became to South
Ossetians. The more the South Ossetians—backed by Russia—responded to this
threat, the more they threatened Georgians, leading Georgia, in turn, to take actions
that increased tensions even more. This increasingly unstable standoﬀ threatened to
collapse until the Georgians ultimately pulled back from war.
This interpretation of escalation moves seamlessly from Georgia’s limited oﬀensive
intentions and South Ossetian (and Russian) uncertainty to a security dilemma:
Georgia acted, South Ossetia (and Russia) reacted, and Georgia counter-reacted. The
problem with this interpretation, however, is that the trigger for escalation is not as
straightforward a catalyst as the discussion makes it seem. Georgia’s deployment of
special forces troops on 31 May, which visibly launched the action–reaction cycle of
escalation, was not logically equivalent to the overall ‘trigger’ to escalation—
Georgia’s tightening of border controls with South Ossetia and increase of armed
checkpoints within and around it. On the basis of these latter actions, and the
Georgian intentions and motivations that produced it, escalation was not a foregone
conclusion.
Georgia’s deployment on 31 May was entirely avoidable. It was made in response to
a verbal threat by Major-General Svyatoslav Nabzdorov, the Russian head of the
JPF, to forcibly remove Georgia’s initial anti-smuggling checkpoints, which
Nabzdorov said contravened existing agreements.93
It was highly unlikely, however,
that Russian peacekeepers were going to attack the Georgian posts. For three of the
four checkpoints, doing so would have required the use of force on indisputably
Georgian territory, something which at the time was highly unlikely. Moreover,
Nabzdorov was given to crude expressions unbecoming of a peacekeeper and probably
did not intend his words to be taken so seriously. He subsequently denied any
intention to dismantle the checkpoints by force, and gave direct reassurances that they
would not be shut down.94
Georgian oﬃcials recognised almost immediately that they had over-reacted. Four
days after the deployment, the two ministers who presided over the insertion of troops
into the region, Minister of Internal Aﬀairs Giorgi Baramidze and Minister of State
Security Zurab Adeishvili, were removed from their positions: Baramidze became
defence minister, presiding over troops that at that time had nothing to do with the
conﬂict, while Adeishvili became prosecutor-general. Irakli Okruashvili, who had been
serving as prosecutor-general after leaving the post of Shida Kartli governor, now
became minister of internal aﬀairs, in charge of police eﬀorts around and in South
Ossetia. Former national security advisor Ivane Merabishvili combined the posts of
93
Imedi TV, 31 May 2004.
94
NTV Mir, RIA Novosti, ITAR-TASS, Imedi TV, 31 May 2004. Speaking to the Georgian
broadcast media during the conﬂict, Nabzdorov accused one channel in particular of ‘showing all sorts
of f**king rubbish’. He continued using profanities to complain about their coverage of him personally
(Imedi TV, 14 July 2004).
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minister of state security and deputy prime minister with the curious oﬃcial
responsibility of coordinating eﬀorts in South Ossetia.95
Merabishvili’s new mandate was telling. A senior government oﬃcial later identiﬁed
one of the government’s key mistakes in South Ossetia as a ‘lack of coordination’
among ministries and the absence of any central crisis management system. Whenever
something bad happened, he said, everyone just ‘ran to the [conﬂict zone]’.96
Indeed,
one OSCE military advisor referred to Georgia’s move as a ‘knee-jerk reaction’, ﬂying
and bussing in as many armed personnel as possible in response to Nabzdorov’s threat
to ‘grind the police into dust’, daring him to ‘try it’.97
By this reading, the insertion of
troops on 31 May was an exaggerated and disorganised response of the Georgian
government to an insigniﬁcant threat, not the rational reaction of an insecure actor
wary of an opponent’s intentions.
This blunder triggered the subsequent escalation, albeit now in psychologically
predictable fashion. In a classic study on misperception in international politics,
Robert Jervis has suggested that actors ‘tend to see the behaviour of others as more
centralized, disciplined, and coordinated than it is’ (Jervis 1968, p. 475).98
Confronted
with evidence of hostile intent, actors are unlikely to attribute it to accident or
disorganisation. This occurred in the aftermath of the 31 May deployment. Viewed by
South Ossetians (and Russians) as evidence of hostile intent, the deployment stood in
sharp contrast to Georgia’s stated defensive security-seeking strategy toward South
Ossetia and even Georgia’s actual limited oﬀensive intentions. The inference that the
South Ossetians (and Russians) drew was that Georgia was considering full-scale
oﬀensive action in South Ossetia—not that its government was disorganised and
prone to over-reaction. Their subsequent escalation was premised on this inference of
hostile intent and not (as a purely structural security dilemma explanation would have
it) on a more ambiguous concern about the oﬀensive implications of new border
monitoring and police checkpoints.
That 31 May was a blunder also explains Georgia’s counter-reaction to the South
Ossetian and Russian moves. Jervis’ study on misperceptions presents two arguments
pertinent to Georgia’s counter-reaction. First, ‘actors often do not realize that actions
intended to project a given image may not have the desired eﬀect because the actions
themselves do not turn out as planned’. Also, since policymakers
are aware of what is to them the important pattern in their actions, they often feel that the
pattern will be equally obvious to others, and they overlook the degree to which the message
is apparent to them only because they know what to look for. (Jervis 1968, p. 474)
In line with these assertions, Georgia discounted the possibility that the 31 May
deployment had distorted South Ossetian and Russian perceptions of its intentions.
Knowing that 31 May was a blunder, and that they were not intending full-scale
oﬀensive action, the Georgians interpreted South Ossetian and Russian actions on this
95
Rustavi-2, 7 June 2004.
96
Author’s interview (anonymous), October 2004, Tbilisi.
97
Brieﬁng by OSCE military advisor, OSCE Mission to Georgia (Tskhinvali oﬃce), October 2004.
98
See also Jervis (1976, pp. 319–42).
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basis, rather than on the possibility that its opponents took 31 May as a serious signal
of oﬀensive military intent. Consequently, Georgia interpreted its opponents’ response
as purely oﬀensive and wholly disproportionate to Georgia’s own blundering actions.
While Georgia knew that it was making at least the South Ossetian leadership
insecure, it still perceived that it was doing so non-violently, while the South Ossetian
leadership was now threatening violence and ethnic cleansing in response. To Georgia,
this demonstrated the South Ossetian regime’s aggressive nature, retroactively
justifying its intent to depose the regime and leading it to new eﬀorts of deterrence
and heightened defence. As for Russia, Georgians would have been hard-pressed to
consider Russian diplomatic and military eﬀorts to deter even a full-scale oﬀensive in
South Ossetia—de jure Georgian territory—to be legitimate, let alone driven somehow
by Russian insecurity. Therefore they could hardly perceive Russian deterrence of
non-violent plans of regime change in the region as legitimate and security-driven.
Failing to interpret Russia’s armed response as an outgrowth of Georgia’s 31 May
misleading signal of oﬀensive military intent, Georgia perceived it to be the
unambiguous act of an aggressor.
The Georgian leadership’s minimisation of the threatening nature of its 31 May
operation was bolstered by yet another misperception that provides a twist to another
of Jervis’ proposals. Jervis noted that ‘when the behavior of the other is undesired, it is
usually seen as derived from internal forces . . . and not by its reaction to the ﬁrst side’
(Jervis 1968, p. 476). He argued that this perception contributes to escalation because
an actor wrongly perceives or overestimates an opponent’s ‘innate’ aggressive
behaviour and reacts accordingly. This observation probably helps explain the
escalation between Georgia and South Ossetian authorities. One Georgian minister
later reﬂected that the assumption that South Ossetians were preparing to attack
Georgian villagers was probably incorrect. While insisting that ‘we couldn’t leave the
Georgian population vulnerable’, he concluded that ‘we could have stopped [the
Ossetians]’ without inserting so many troops. They ‘would not have attacked the
peaceful population’, he reasoned; ‘It was not in their interests’.99
However, the misperception operated in a diﬀerent manner with regard to another
relevant actor—the Ossetian population at large. As mentioned, Georgia’s strategy
depended in large part on the unlikely premise that the South Ossetian population
would eagerly rise up against its leadership given an appropriate excuse and
opportunity, such as the economic blockade of the region. Viewing their actions as
short-term and motivated by good intentions, Georgians were unaware of or wilfully
amnesiac in relation to South Ossetian perceptions equating Georgian blockades to
the Georgian–South Ossetian conﬂict of the early 1990s and did not see how they
would create far more suspicion than support among South Ossetians.100
Tea
Tutberidze, a leader of the Georgian youth organisation Kmara that was active at the
time in South Ossetia, understood how government policy was failing: ‘Right now,
99
Author’s interview (anonymous), October 2004, Tbilisi.
100
Ossetians observed that a visit to the region by the Georgian ﬁrst lady, Sandra Roelofs, at the time
of escalation ‘reminded them of how the ﬁrst Georgian–Ossetian conﬂict got started [in 1989.] They
fear[ed] that Georgian troops, carrying banners of peace, [would] once again march into Tskhinvali’
(Freese 2004f).
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Ossetians are calling this the ‘‘humanitarian invasion’’. Rather than coming in with
cameras and a big entourage, authorities need to enter with genuine support. If they
are sincere, information will spread quickly and Ossetians might support the
initiatives’ (Freese 2004c). One minister interviewed after the fact acknowledged that
rather than win Ossetians over, Georgian activities had ‘irritated’ the Ossetian
population. Though the government had been aware that its ‘anti-smuggling’
measures would negatively impact the local population, dependent on trade and
freedom of movement, he also believed that Georgians had underestimated South
Ossetians’ ‘collective paranoia’—something that the 31 May deployment only fed.101
When, at the time, Ossetian support was not forthcoming, the Georgian leadership
concluded that this was because the South Ossetian authorities were forcing the
population to resist. Thus, while Georgians followed Jervis’ script in misperceiving
that ‘undesired behavior’ (popular South Ossetian resistance) was generated internally
(by leadership pressure) rather than by Georgia’s actions, this led them to
underestimate rather than overestimate the hostility of most South Ossetians. This
overly rosy view of the local population obscured for authorities the danger of
escalation.
To conclude, armed conﬂict was not a predictable outcome of Georgia’s initial
actions. Alone, the closure of roads into and out of South Ossetia, the establishment of
traﬃc checkpoints in the conﬂict zone, and a limited deployment of police in
Georgian-populated villages might have ratcheted up tensions and even given rise to
minor confrontation. However, while Georgian success in deposing the South Ossetian
regime was by no means given (and probably unlikely), it is also not evident that a
more limited deployment would have led to the escalation that actually occurred. If
Georgia had maintained a more limited incursion, the South Ossetian leadership
would have been far less likely to take a decision to threaten Georgian-populated
villages or otherwise go on a war footing, and Russia would not have been so extreme
in its diplomatic warnings or so ready to transit weaponry to South Ossetia.102
Conﬂict, thus, was not solely the product of a ‘structural’ security dilemma, inherent in
101
Author’s interview (anonymous), October 2004, Tbilisi.
102
A pertinent question is whether a restrained Russian response would just have reduced the
likelihood of escalation or actually enabled Georgia to topple the government in South Ossetia. Before
the summer, Georgia had been highly optimistic that Russia would allow Tbilisi to re-establish control
over South Ossetia without resistance. A senior government oﬃcial explained that the lesson of
Russia’s lack of obstructive reaction in the Rose Revolution and, in a more direct parallel, its
facilitation of Aslan Abashidze’s removal from Adjara, was that if Russia were presented with a similar
‘fait accompli’ in South Ossetia, it would back down. A Georgian diplomat asserted that before the
conﬂict erupted, even US oﬃcials ‘had a sense’ through their conversations with Russian counterparts
that Russia would permit Georgia to re-establish control over South Ossetia, while digging in further in
Abkhazia—a region Russia had greater economic and strategic interests in controlling. ‘We didn’t
think Russia would be so active’, lamented one senior government oﬃcial. As it turned out, Russia was
unwilling to retreat from South Ossetia, probably because the Kremlin realised that if the Georgian
government was victorious in South Ossetia, it would be supremely conﬁdent (following the Rose
Revolution and the victory in Adjara) and would not be able to resist trying to retake Abkhazia as
well. That same diplomat conceded this was a possibility: ‘I guarantee you’, he said, that such a
scenario would have unfolded ‘the next day’ (author’s interviews (anonymous), September and
October 2004, Washington, DC and Tbilisi).
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the nature of anarchic relations and exacerbated by features of internal conﬂict. It
arose out of the interaction of permissible structural conditions with a speciﬁc
blunder—a misleading signal of oﬀensive military intent—and cognitive misperceptions
that either ﬂowed from that action or minimised its impact.
A security dilemma in 2008?
By August 2008, the local territorial gains that Georgia had achieved four years before
were impressively consolidated, with even the JPF acknowledging Georgiancontrolled
territories within South Ossetia.103
Politically, however, the prospects for
conﬂict were dimmer than ever, as Russia took a series of measures to formalise the
status of South Ossetia and Abkhazia as economic and security protectorates,
heightening Georgia’s insecurity with regard to its territorial integrity. When the war
broke out in August, South Ossetians, together with Russia, again accused Georgia of
implementing a plan to take control of South Ossetia by force. Georgians insisted, in
turn, that the South Ossetians and Russia were the ones implementing the ﬁnal phase
of their own plan to seize all South Ossetia, including Georgian-controlled villages and
positions.
As in 2004, however, an explanation for conﬂict that presumes ambitious war
plans on either side is not necessarily correct. While the origins of the 2008 war
must be further investigated, an initial glance at the escalation that led to the
Tskhinvali oﬀensive is consistent with an explanation grounded in the security
dilemma.
Unlike in 2004, the trigger for escalation remains hazy. Despite a considerable rise
in tensions since 2004, it still remains unclear whether either Russia or Georgia was
making a speciﬁc eﬀort to change (or forestall a change to) the status quo in the region
in the ﬁrst half of 2008.104
Unexplained exchanges of ﬁre between Tskhinvali and
Georgian villages occurred in mid-June, resulting in the death of one Ossetian.105
A
more immediate trigger for escalation was a pair of bomb attacks at the start of July.
The ﬁrst killed the local Ossetian head of police of a Tskhinvali suburb, an individual
who Georgian oﬃcials had once tagged as the leader of an ‘illegal armed
formation’.106
The second was an apparent assassination attempt against the
Georgian-backed ‘alternative’ president of South Ossetia, Dmitry Sanakoev, who
since 2006 enjoyed authority over Georgian-controlled areas within South Ossetia.107
South Ossetians (and Russians) accused Georgia of killing the policeman and of
staging the attack on Sanakoev. Georgia blamed internal Ossetian power struggles for
103
For the map, see International Crisis Group (2007, p. 28).
104
Though for the case against Russia, see Illarionov (2009) and Felgenhauer (2009).
105
ITAR-TASS, 15 June 2008; ‘One Dies, Four Injured in S. Ossetia Shootout’, Civil.ge Daily News
Online (Tbilisi), 16 June 2008, available at: http://www.civil.ge/eng/article.php?id¼18548&search¼,
accessed November 2008.
106
‘Georgian Policemen, Civilians Detained in South Ossetia’, Civil.ge, 6 December 2005, available
at: http://www.civil.ge/eng/article.php?id¼11280&search¼, accessed November 2008.
107
‘Three Injured in Attack on Georgian Convoy in S. Ossetia’, Civil.ge, 3 July 2008, available at:
http://www.civil.ge/eng/article. php?id¼18674&search¼, both sites accessed November 2008.
92 CORY WELT
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the policeman’s death (as they had past bomb attacks) and accused the South Ossetian
authorities of targeting their political adversary.
Regardless of how the conﬂict began, and to what end, the cycle of reaction and
counter-reaction that ensued is consistent with a security dilemma explanation. New
vulnerabilities (the attack on Sanakoev’s convoy) led Georgians to take measures to
increase their security which threatened South Ossetians, who responded (with
Russian assistance) in ways that further decreased Georgian security. The attack on
Sanakoev led Georgia to establish new positions on the heights above the bypass road
where his convoy had been attacked. The bomb attacks also led to several days of titfor-tat
shootouts, shellings, and arrests, with three Ossetians reported killed. Georgia
eventually threatened to use force to free four soldiers that the South Ossetian
authorities had detained.108
This threat led to a number of Russian actions plausibly intended to deter Georgia
from using force against South Ossetia. These included violating Georgian airspace
over South Ossetia, as well as having various military divisions announce their
preparation to support Russian peacekeepers in the event of an escalation of
conﬂict.109
At the same time, from mid-July, Russia held scheduled military exercises
with thousands of troops near the Georgian border. The troops did not leave the area
after the exercises concluded but instead camped near the frontier crossing into South
Ossetia a few kilometres away from the Roki tunnel (Felgenhauer 2008).
The next stage of escalation appears to have been sparked by South Ossetian eﬀorts
to retake the strategic heights that Georgia occupied at the start of the month. At the
end of July, a new series of shootouts and shellings between Georgian and Ossetiancontrolled
villages and positions ensued, culminating on 1 August with a roadside
bomb attack on a Georgian police vehicle. This sparked more exchanges of ﬁre and
heavy shelling between Tskhinvali and Georgian-controlled villages to its south and
east, with six more Ossetians killed.110
As a result of these clashes, South Ossetians came to embrace openly oﬀensive
intentions. Local authorities ﬁrst warned they would announce a general mobilisation
and appeal for assistance from volunteers from the North Caucasus to defend against
Georgian aggression. They also announced the start of an evacuation of children and
108
Interfax, 3 July 2008; ‘Two Killed in Overnight Shelling in S. Ossetia’, Civil.ge, 4 July 2008,
available at: http://www.civil.ge/eng/article.php?id¼18677&search¼; Georgian State Television Channel
One, 8 July 2008, accessed November 2008.
109
Press Release, ‘Russian MFA Information and Press Department Commentary Concerning the
Situation in South Ossetia’, Ministry of the Foreign Aﬀairs of the Russian Federation, 10 July 2008,
available at: http://www.ln.mid.ru/brp_4.nsf/e78a48070f128a7b43256999005bcbb3/d87cf4c1a75524e
3c3257483001c43af?OpenDocument; Interfax, 10 July 2008; Press Release, ‘Komandovaniem KSPM
prinyati mery po povysheniyu boevoi gotovnosti podrazdeleneii rossiiskogo mirotvorcheskogo
kontingenta’, Ministry of Defence of the Russian Federation, 11 July 2008; available at: http://
www.mil.ru/info/1069/details/index.shtml?id¼47094; Interfax, 4 August 2008; all sites accessed
November 2008.
110
‘MIA: Five Policemen Injured in S. Ossetia Blast’, Civil.ge, 1 August 2008, available at: http://
www.civil.ge/eng/article.php?id¼18868&search¼; ‘Six Die in S. Ossetia Shootout’, Civil.ge, 2 August
2008, available at: http://www.civil.ge/eng/article.php?id¼18871&search¼, all sites accessed November
2008.
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women from Tskhinvali.111
Finally, on 4 August, they issued an ultimatum that
signalled a major change in the status quo of the last four years: that Georgia should
withdraw all its armed forces from South Ossetia, including from the territories it had
‘occupied’. While potentially referring only to non-peacekeeping forces, and ostensibly
in reaction to what South Ossetians perceived as Georgia’s latest eﬀorts to change the
status quo, South Ossetians had tacitly accepted these forces for four years. Now,
Kokoiti warned that ‘we shall take the most decisive measures in order to resolve this
problem for good’ if Georgians did not stand down.112
In light of Kokoiti’s threat, we can say that the war had begun already in the
afternoon of 6 August, a day and a half before the Georgian oﬀensive on Tskhinvali.
By the South Ossetians’ own admission, ﬁghting broke out as they sought to remove
Georgian troops from positions they had occupied on heights southwest of Tskhinvali.
Fire-ﬁghts and shellings there and to the east of Tskhinvali raged through the night
and again the following morning. In the afternoon of 7 August, the ﬁrst Georgian
fatalities of the conﬂict were reported, two peacekeepers and eight civilians, while
South Ossetians reported two more deaths.113
The ﬁnal steps to the Tskhinvali oﬀensive consisted of what appears to have been
mutual deterrence failure between Georgia and, ﬁnally, Russia directly. In the early
afternoon, Georgia mobilised its forces and weaponry stationed tens of kilometres
away from Tskhinvali (including forces that had arrived from western Georgia) and
brought them close to the region; a few hours later, the Georgian government declared
a unilateral ceaseﬁre.114
Georgians say that this combination of stick and soft talk was
intended to deter South Ossetians from further attacks while giving another
opportunity for negotiations to succeed. Their mobilisation, however, appears to
have sparked a mobilisation of the regular Russian army troops located on the other
side of the Roki tunnel, plausibly Russia’s own last-ditch eﬀort to deter Georgia from
launching a full oﬀensive on South Ossetia.
The Georgians appear to have feared the worst from this Russian mobilisation.
Georgian oﬃcials report that by 11:30 that night they were receiving intelligence that
over 100 military vehicles were crossing through the tunnel. They explain that this
development, along with earlier reported troop crossings, a remark earlier that day by
the Russian commander of the JPF that the South Ossetians were uncontrollable, and
renewed attacks on Georgian villages after the unilateral ceaseﬁre was declared, all led
them to fear that Russia was supporting a fully ﬂedged eﬀort by South Ossetia to drive
Georgia out of the region. Georgian oﬃcials say the ensuing operation had the
objectives of neutralising the ﬁring positions of the Ossetians and stopping the
111
ITAR-TASS, 2 August 2008; RIA Novosti, 5 August 2008, accessed November 2008.
112
Interfax, 4 August 2008.
113
Interfax and ITAR-TASS, 6 August 2008; ‘‘‘Intensive Shootout’’ Reported in S. Ossetia’, Civil.ge,
6 August 2008, available at: http://www.civil.ge/eng/article.php?id¼18909&search¼; ‘Source: About
10 Georgians Dead in S. Ossetia Clashes’, Civil.ge, 7 August 2008, available at: http://www.civil.ge/
eng/article.php?id¼18933&search¼; ‘Reports: Two Die in S. Ossetian Village’, Civil.ge, 7 August 2008,
available at: http://www.civil.ge/eng/article.php?id¼18936&search¼, all sites accessed November 2008.
114
Interfax and Rustavi-2 TV, 7 August 2008.
94 CORY WELT
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incoming Russian troops from reaching the town.115
While the Tskhinvali oﬀensive
appeared to fulﬁl the ﬁrst objective, the failure to destroy a bridge north of Tskhinvali
in timely fashion doomed the second. The Russian response to the oﬀensive, especially
after the attack on their column above Tskhinvali, was massive, and the Russo–
Georgian war had begun.
If this version of events accurately represents the build-up to war, August 2008 was
a more extreme version of the war that was averted in August 2004. Neither Georgians
nor Ossetians (nor Russians) really wanted war, but they worried about the other
side’s oﬀensive intentions and even believed the other side really did seek war.
Signiﬁcantly, both Georgians and Ossetians were now more capable of quickly and
intensively defending their positions and taking oﬀensive action to defend their
security than in 2004. In 2008 the sides may not have been seeking war, but unlike in
2004 they were at least preparing for it.
At the same time, why war still seemed unlikely in 2008 is also part of the legacy of
2004. Assuming continued Russian determination to keep Georgia from establishing
control over South Ossetia, avoiding war in August 2008 ultimately required Georgian
restraint—something that depended on Georgians believing they had something to
gain from the absence of war and that a war that engaged Russia invited disaster.
These lessons should still have been suﬃciently relevant in 2008 to again prompt
Georgian restraint.
Upon closer inspection, however, at least two diﬀerences emerge. First, restraint, far
from consolidating existing gains, suggested to Georgians in 2008 a very high chance
of losing the gains they had made in South Ossetia since 2004. By 7 August, Georgian
oﬃcials appear to have believed they were witnessing a process of Russian military
occupation of South Ossetia. Second, Georgians appear to have gained new
conﬁdence that their military could successfully take on the Russians, at least by
staving oﬀ their entrance into Tskhinvali, while sadly underestimating Russia’s will to
escalate the conﬂict to full inter-state war. Heightened perceptions of threat and false
optimism thus appear to have led to Georgia’s Tskhinvali oﬀensive and the
unintended consequences that followed. Regardless of how escalation began in the
summer of 2008, the spiral to war adheres to the logic of the security dilemma.
Georgetown University
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