Russia ‘Dying’ to Be What it Hates Most: A New America – Le Monde

The Sign Says: ‘Russian Sphere of Influence’
NATO Representatives Tell Georgia: ‘They Are Withdrawing’

Why has Russia gone on a rampage in Georgia? Thornike Gordadze of the Caucuses Observatory at the French Institute of Anatolian Studies has an interesting and compelling take:

“Russia is dying with desire to be what it hates most – a new America. An America which goes to war in Iraq without U.N. backing; An America that punishes Serbia; and an America that is godfather of the new state – Kosovo. ‘Europe is part of the periphery’ said a Russian MP. Russia has begun to imagine itself as a rising superpower confronting a declining America. The Russian media, entirely controlled by the Kremlin, has been feeding its readers with propaganda about new Russian grandeur.

“Russian MP Serguei Markov, a political scientist attached to the Kremlin, said that the signal to begin military operations had been given personally by Dick Cheney, and that Russia was at war against America – the only rival worthy of the new rival Russian power.”

By Thornike Gordadze*

Translated By Sandrine Agoerges

August 21, 2008

France – Le Monde – Original Article (French)

“We won’t behave like monkeys, we won’t imitate, we have our own house recipe!,” said Vladimir Putin at a press conference last February, shortly before the Western countries recognized the independence of Kosovo. This enigmatic statement has continued to haunt policy makers and analysts in Europe, who sensed that the reply would come in the Caucuses. In searching for culprits, Georgia had all the traits of an ideal sinner. For a long time, it had been accumulating negative points: fiercely pro-Western; stubbornly seeking greater Euro-Atlantic integration; and it had opened more and more of its territory to create an energy corridor that deprived Gazprom and its political offshoot – the Kremlin – of monopoly control over European supplies.

There were other candidates – the Baltic states and Ukraine – but the former had already been sheltered under the NATO umbrella, and the latter is too beg to be swallowed and digested with impunity at this stage.

The current war is not one between Georgians and their Ossetian minority, or even between Russia and Georgia for the control of South Ossetia. Between the figure of 2,000 civilian casualties in Ossetia brandished by Russian authorities and the fifty counted by investigators of Human Rights Watch, guess which is the most credible report? South Ossetia, governed for years by Russian officers, became a Russian enclave planted in the heart of an independent Georgia. Economically insignificant, demographically battered, Ossetia has become the most militarized area of the entire Soviet space: 2,500 armed men for every 35,000 residents.

READ ON AT WORLDMEETS.US, along with continuing translated foreign press coverage of the unfolding crisis in the caucuses.