The decision to retaliate against Georgia in 2008 was made at the right time, said Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, who was Russian president at the time.
“All decisions that were made back then were made exactly when this had to be done. I believed that at the time those decisions concerned a foreign state, a state that we had recognized as Georgia before August 26,” Medvedev told reporters during his visit to South Ossetia on Wednesday.
He was responding to a film circulated on the Internet, in which former chief of the General Staff Yury Baluyevsky claimed that the decision to conduct a peace enforcement operation against Georgia was made late, which led to additional losses.
“Yes, we did maintain our own relations both with South Ossetia and Abkhazia, yet at the time we talked about Georgia’s territorial integrity, though we were aware that it was practically impossible. But these decisions were made only in the case of the launch of direct aggression against Russian citizens and Russian peacekeepers,” Medvedev said.
“This happened in the early hours of August 8,” he said.
“I made my decision two and a half hours after the Georgian army started an active operation. Not sooner, because it would have been wrong, being a decision to use the Russian Armed Forces in a foreign territory, I stress, in a foreign territory. But not later either,” the prime minister said.
“I made the decision on a missile strike at 4 a.m.” on August 8, Medvedev said.
“Those who claim otherwise either do not know or deliberately misrepresent,” he said.
“As regards my consultations with colleagues, with the defense minister, with other colleagues, I have already given comments. These boil down to the following: decisions of this sort are made only by one person, that person was me as the country’s Supreme commander-in-chief and President,” Medvedev said.
I contacted then Prime Minister Vladimir Putin who was in Bejing on August 8, he said. “But the point is not even who contacted who and when, but what decisions had to be made and at which moment. I am certain that the decisions that I made, about the retaliatory use of force, in that situation back then were made exactly at the moment when they needed to be made,” Medvedev said.
“Otherwise, we would not have resolved the problems we had to resolve. But we did, at a minimum expense. If these decisions had been made later, the situation could really have become completely different,” he said.
Georgia had been at war for 20 years from the start, he recalled. “This was a quietly ongoing very difficult civil war between certain parts of the country. Nothing had changed there for years,” Medvedev said.
“It was a permanent field of tensions that we felt, which is exactly why we tried to help resolve the conflict. Russia was in the tripartite commission of Russia, Ossetia and Georgia and sent its peacekeepers,” he said.
“But that did not stop Saakashvili making a decision to carry out a military strike. This is very sad because he thus chopped off very landmark pieces of his country and tore his homeland apart,” Medvedev said.
