Strongman, The

Russians militarily, that this would be a foolhardy thing to do.’
    National security adviser Stephen Hadley says: ‘The issue was, do we put in combat power or not? What you needed was ground troops if you were going to save Tbilisi.’ 30
    But that would have risked conflict between the world’s greatest nuclear powers, and voices such as that of Robert Gates urged caution: ‘I was pretty adamant that we not give weapons assistance to Saakashvili. My feeling at the time was that the Russians had baited a trap and Saakashvili had walked right into it, and so they were both culpable.’
    In the end, the Russians stopped and turned around, and the Americans no longer needed to consider a military response. They did send navy transport planes to Tbilisi airport, and warships through the Black Sea to the port of Batumi, to deliver humanitarian aid (and even that infuriated the Russians), but the decision was to let diplomacy work. Despite considerable misgivings about the competence of President Sarkozy, they decided to allow France, which at that point held the rotating presidency of the European Union, to take the lead.
    Although the Russians maintained at the time that only Medvedev was involved in the talks with Sarkozy, Putin was there too, predictably playing the hard man. It was during those talks that he declared, ‘I am going to hang Saakashvili by the balls.’ (The Russians denied the report, but Putin has since himself indirectly confirmed that he did use the expression. 31 )
    Sarkozy took with him to the talks a draft agreement which Lavrov says, ‘we corrected a little bit’. In fact the six-point document was almost obliterated with amendments, so that, for example, the first sentence read ‘The Georgian and Russian forces will withdraw fully.’
    Sarkozy’s adviser, Jean-David Levitte, recalls: ‘They’d completely changed the logic, it was no longer a ceasefire, it was no longer a retreat of troops, it was essentially a way of imposing a kind of diktat on Georgia.’
    Sarkozy proved to be, in the words of President Medvedev’s adviser, Sergei Prikhodko, ‘tough, very tough’. Eventually he tired of the Russians’ negotiating tactics. ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘we’ve been going round in circles with this draft. I’m picking up my pen and writing a new draft. Right, first of all the conflicting parties agree to the non-use of force. Agreed – yes or no? Yes.’
    There then followed five more points: cessation of hostilities, free access for humanitarian aid, Georgian forces to withdraw to their normal bases, Russian forces to withdraw to their position before the outbreak of hostilities, and international talks to be held on the future status of Abkhazia and South Ossetia.
    Point 5 contained an extra clause which would soon cause trouble. ‘Pending an international mechanism’, Russian ‘peacekeepers’ were to put in place ‘additional security measures’. That was a fluid prescription, which Moscow would use to justify maintaining its troops in a wide security zone, and even in parts of Georgia proper, long after the peace deal went into force.
    Sarkozy flew to Tbilisi with the paper. But it was to point 6 that Saakashvili refused to sign up, because ‘talks on future status’ seemed to leave the question of Georgia’s territorial integrity open. Lavrov said in an interview that the whole point of having the clause about international talks on the regions’ status was to demonstrate that Russia did not intend to recognise them unilaterally: it would be up to an international conference to decide. But Saakashvili was adamant, and the point was changed, after a quick midnight phone-call from Sarkozy to Medvedev in Moscow, to read: ‘talks on security and stability’ in the two regions. Those talks have continued off and on, achieving little, in Geneva ever since.
    But Saakashvili had already lost the big point. On 26 August, President Medvedev suddenly announced that Russia was recognising the independence of both South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Two new states were born, which would be recognised by only Venezuela, Nicaragua and the Pacific island of Nauru. Even Russia’s former Soviet allies would not go down that road. Russia had finally accepted the Kosovo precedent (though not, of course, in relation to Kosovo itself). For all the world it gave the impression that annexation would be the next move, and that this had been Russia’s intent from the outset.
    I have yet to meet