Strongman, The

but most observers (including the EU mission) say there is no evidence of a large-scale Russian invasion in the hours before the Georgian attack. Indeed Saakashvili himself did not make such a claim at the time, and the Georgian government told a UN Security Council session on 8 August that ‘at 05:30 [that day] the first Russian troops entered South Ossetia through the Roki tunnel’. In interviews conducted two years later with several members of the Georgian government, they seemed hopelessly confused about the timeline.
    That the Georgians attacked first, and that it was an attempt not to repulse a Russian attack but to retake South Ossetia, is also confirmed by a conversation the Polish foreign minister Radoslaw Sikorski had with his Georgian counterpart Eka Tkeshelashvili the day before the attack on Tskhinvali. ‘Eka called me and said they were going to establish constitutional authority over South Ossetia. What I understood was that they were moving in. I warned her not to overplay their hand and to be very careful, because allowing yourself to be provoked would have dire consequences.’ 22
    The fact that President Medvedev was on holiday on a Volga riverboat, Prime Minister Putin was in Beijing for the opening of the Olympic Games and foreign minister Lavrov was in the middle of Russia (four-and-a-half-hours’ flight from Moscow), and all had to rush back to Moscow to deal with the crisis, also suggests that Russia was taken by surprise and did not instigate the attack – even though its army was clearly well prepared to respond.
    So why did this war erupt when it did? Only a week or so earlier, Georgia’s leaders had been on holiday. Their best troops were serving in Iraq. Although Saakashvili wished to regain the lost territories, he appeared to be giving diplomacy a last chance. As late as 7 August, Georgia’s negotiator, Temuri Yakobashvili, even went to Tskhinvali for planned talks that failed to materialise (because the South Ossetian side refused to take part and the Russian special envoy failed to arrive, saying he had a flat tyre). Russia, it is true, had been sabre-rattling – but mainly to dissuade Georgia from attacking rather than because it was contemplating an attack itself; Moscow in fact had little to gain from attacking Georgia and had never (despite claims to the contrary) shown any desire to annexe or even recognise the two regions. Its clobbering of Georgia and subsequent recognition of South Ossetia and Abkhazia as independent ‘states’ should not be seen as retrospective proof that this was what it intended to do all along.
    It seems to me that right up until the eve of battle neither side was seriously planning to go to war (though both were preparing for it). That would mean that the fatal decision was taken at the last minute by Saakashvili and his closest advisers. Perhaps they felt that the world’s eyes were on the Olympics in Beijing; perhaps they weighed up everything they had heard from the Americans recently and decided that, on balance, they would have their support; perhaps they really were given intelligence (even if it was false) that the Russians were already streaming through the Roki tunnel; perhaps they saw the failure of the Russians and South Ossetians to turn up for talks with their negotiator as an ominous sign, and Medvedev’s evasiveness and hint that ‘things could get worse’ as a threat; perhaps they jumped at what they thought was an unexpected opportunity to retake South Ossetia. Whatever the reasons, the decision confirmed the worst fears of Saakashvili’s American and other Western colleagues – who liked him, respected him, loved his democratic credentials, but were very alive to his unpredictability, his impulsiveness, even his instability. One of the enduring images of the war is of Saakashvili, recorded by a BBC camera as he waited to go on air for a live broadcast, nervously stuffing the end of his tie into his mouth. The Russians leapt on this as proof of his ‘insanity’. But many of his Western colleagues also had their doubts. When Angela Merkel had talks with him as a peace settlement was being thrashed out, he was extremely agitated, drank from an empty glass and knocked a bottle of water across the table.
    One senior American official (extremely close to Saakashvili) witnessed a top-level get-together in Tbilisi, after midnight, a few weeks before the war: ‘My impression was just – what a rip-roaring and disorganised