Quite a macho act here by Russian President Dmitri Medvedev. In a televised interview on Russia’s ties with Georgia, released on the eve of the third anniversary of the 2008 Russia-Georgia war, he did everything short of blowing smoke off a gun.
Often seen as Moscow's good cop (with Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin in the role of bad cop), Medvedev claimed that the 2008 conflict with Georgia was his war, not Putin’s. He also, per tradition, had some unflattering descriptive adjectives for his Georgian counterpart, Mikheil Saakashvili.
Medvedev described the Georgian president as a “sticky” man, who stalked him at the pair’s last, pre-war meeting in Astana, Kazakhstan, when the Russian president just wanted to enjoy a glass of wine. Medvedev said that Saakashvili repeatedly approached him about talks on breakaway Abkhazia and South Ossetia. He denied allegations that he had been trying to ignore Saakashvili and claimed he would have been happy to hold those talks.
But then, one fateful day, an American woman came to Tbilisi and Saakashvili had a change of heart. “He stopped writing, stopped calling, stopping getting in touch,” Medvedev reminisced, a tad bitterly. This woman’s visit served perhaps as an unintentional incentive for Georgia to choose a different course of action toward South Ossetia, he continued.
The said femme fatale was, of course, then Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Medvedev again reiterated the view that Georgia's friendly ties with the Bush administration encouraged Saakashvili to try and reclaim South Ossetia by force. As Medvedev tells it, the first thing former President George W. Bush said to him when the two leaders met for the first time was “Misha Saakashvili is a good guy, right?”
Granted, Washington’s bonhomie with Tbilisi has sparked fits of geopolitical jealousy in Moscow many a time before.
Yet, as much as he hates Saakashvili now, Medvedev believes the Georgian president still owes him one. “At some point, I simply stopped forces [headed toward Tbilisi]. Had I not done that, Georgia most likely would have a different president now... " he claimed. (French President Nicholas Sarkozy, though, might care to challenge him for the title of Georgia's savior.)
"[T]oppling Saakashvili… was not part of my plans, but doing so was very easy,” Medvedev said, with a snap of the fingers.
He also defended Russia’s choice to invade deep into Georgian territory, well beyond the South Ossetian conflict zone, and dismissed parallels between the South Ossetia war and Moscow’s bloody campaigns to squash separatism in Chechnya, which he described as attempts to “establish order.”
But while Medvedev may talk the talk of a tough guy, his delivery sparks doubts about how comfortable he is walking the walk. Call this tamada a skeptic, but, somehow, the Russian leader's footloose side looks more convincing.
Giorgi Lomsadze is a journalist based in Tbilisi, and author of Tamada Tales.
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