Analysis: Georgia's decision to shell Tskhinvali could prove 'reckless'

President timed action to coincide with Olympics, says academic

It has always been hard to work out who fired the first shot in any of the many conflicts that had broken out in the Caucasus.

Ever since June 1992, when the tiny mountain enclave of South Ossetia won the first round of its bid to detach itself from Georgia, the two sides have been intermittently at war.

But the flare-ups in the last decade have been skirmishes, and for a while it looked as though peace had broken out.

The weapons used today — tanks, multiple rocket launchers and fighter aircraft — made the fighting qualitatively different.

Observers had little doubt that the operation to take South Ossetia back under Georgian control bore the hallmarks of a planned military offensive.

It was not the result of a ceasefire that had broken down the night before - it was more a fulfilment of the promise the Georgian president, Mikhail Saakashvili, had made to recapture lost national territory, and with it a measure of nationalist pride.

The assault appears to be have carefully timed to coincide with the opening of the Olympics when the Russian prime minister, Vladimir Putin, was in Beijing.

Tom de Waal, of the Institute for War and Peace Reporting and an expert on the region, said: "Clearly there have been incidents on both sides, but this is obviously a planned Georgian operation, a contingency plan they have had for some time, to retake [the South Ossetian capital] Tskhinvali.

"Possibly the Georgians calculated that, with Putin in Beijing, they could recapture the capital in two days and then defend it over the next two months, because the Russians won't take this lying down."

If Georgia calculated that Russia would be inhibited by Putin's presence at the Olympics, that soon backfired.

Within hours, the Russian president, Dmitri Medvedev, chaired a session of the security council in the Kremlin, ordering units of the 58th Russian army to retake Tskhinvali. The Russian president's military credentials are so weak - he had no other choice.

Many of the 75,000 inhabitants of Tskhinvali and its outlying villages are now Russian citizens, with passports and rights to settle in Russia.

Northern Ossetia, with whom the southern separatists want to join, is formally part of the Russian Federation. While Georgians view South Ossetia as a part of its sovereign territory, there is a rival Ossetian claim.

It predates the current authoritarian regime in the Kremlin, but still links the enclave to the mothership of the Russian Federation.

Jonathan Eyal, the director of studies at the Royal United Services Institute (Rusi), warned that all-out war between Russian and Georgia would amount to "the worst crisis in Europe since the end of communism".

He described Georgia's decision to shell Tskhinvali as a brazen effort to humiliate the Russians.

"It is clearly a calculated gamble by the Georgians," he said.

"If they manage to overrun South Ossetia, where there are probably only around 1,000 Russian troops at the moment, they will have humiliated Russia and would have created a triumph for themselves.

"They will also have propelled the west into a diplomatic involvement on the ground."

Eyal claimed there was considerable sympathy among western powers over Georgia's difficult relationship with Russia.

He said the country was suffering from a deliberate "strategic fomentation" of the separatist movement by the superpower.

However, he warned that taking on Russia at a time when Medvedev was keen to establish his influence carried significant risk.

Russia could not afford to stand quietly by while Georgia made such a public assault on its troops stationed in the region, he said.

"There is an element of trying to call the Russians' bluff by assuming that the Russians will not be able to afford all-out war in Georgia," he added.

"I personally don't buy that … Putin cannot afford to be seen to be humiliated in such a brazen, public way. It's inconceivable that the Russians will sit quietly by.

"The only possible outcome is that either a ceasefire is negotiated and a mediation effort begins, or it goes out into an all-out war."

Eyal said he believed Georgia's move to strike South Ossetia would generate a mixed reaction from world powers.

He described a feeling that the country was "more sinned against than sinning" but that there was also significant frustration over the actions of its president.

"If it goes into an all out war, the predicament for the west is acute and the crisis would be the worst crisis in Europe since the end of communism.

"It would be much worse than the Yugoslav wars, mainly because it has the old traditional element of an east-west confrontation.

"There is considerable sympathy for Georgia among western governments such as the US and London. It is clear that the Russians have fomented the separatist movement for a particular strategic purpose.

"There is also, however, an enormous amount of frustration with the reckless behaviour of the Georgian president at this moment."

· This article was amended on Monday August 11 2008. Jonathan Eyal said that the separatist movement in South Ossetia was undergoing "strategic fomentation" by Russia, not "fermentation" as we said. This has been corrected.

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