Vladimir Solovyov, host of one of Russia’s most popular Sunday-evening television talk-shows, had Russia Today editor-in-chief Margarita Simonyan as his guest on September 23. During the program, Simonyan tried to explain how popular Russia and President Vladimir Putin are around the world. She claimed that this is true even in Georgia, a country which Russia had a war with in 2008. But when Simonyan mentioned this, Solovyov corrected her, saying that what she called a “war” was in fact an Moscow’s “operation for the enforcement of peace.”
While an independent report commissioned by the European Union after the war did largely put blame on Georgia for the start of hostilities in August 2008, it also noted that both sides committed violations of international humanitarian law.
