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I am unable to read the Foreign Affairs take on Georgia. It is sealed behind a paywall, available only to those willing to shell out money for Council on Foreign Relations war propaganda.

The article in question, “Make Russia Pay: Lessons From the West’s Botched Response to Moscow’s 2008 Assault on Georgia,” was penned by Vasil Sikharulidze, the former defense minister of Georgia, now a Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. He is a Founder of the Atlantic Council of Georgia.

Considering this gentleman’s bio, the positions he held in the Georgian government, and his association with an institute once led by the neocon Daniel Pipes, we can assume the post is simply more anti-Russian propaganda, as the headline suggests.

First and foremost, let’s address the historically incorrect assertion Russia “assaulted” Georgia. An honest reading of history—which usually results in an allergic reaction on the part of the CFR—dispels the myth Russia invaded South Ossetia, an ethnic Russian enclave.

“Late in the evening of the 7th of August, 2008, when the whole world anticipated the opening of the Olympic Games in Beijing, the Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili ordered his [western-trained] troops to invade the South Ossetian capital of Tskhinval,” writes Anatoly Kudryavtsev.

The Georgian military shelled Tskhinval, and the villages of Dmenis, Znaur, Tsunar-Khetagurovo, and Khetagurovo with GRAD rockets, howitzer artillery, and large-caliber mortars, according to the RES Information Agency.

Georgian SU-25 aircraft strafed South Ossetia. Infrastructure was attacked, including an irrigation pipeline in the northern part of Tskhinval. Basements, where civilians huddled to escape the bombardment, were flooded by Georgian troops.

Civilian population, elderly and children are under intensive fire of GRAD artillery systems, as well as large-caliber cannons and mortars. At the entries to Tskhinval, street fighting is ongoing. Majority of projectiles and shells are blowing up in the center of the town. There are killed and wounded. It is still impossible to bring the wounded to the hospital. Tens of houses in the capital of South Ossetia are burning. The fire is opened from the Georgian territories in the direction of Gori adjacent to the borderlines with South Ossetia… Georgian aggressors are bombing houses of civilians. People have no place to find shelter from the enemy’s fire, they are killed in their houses. It is impossible to estimate the number of casualties.

At this point, there were only Russian peacekeepers in South Ossetia, positioned there in 1992 after the fall of the Soviet Union. Calls for independence by South Ossetia and Abkhazia resulted in ethnic conflict.

Prior to this, the South Ossetian Autonomous Oblast of the Georgian SSR had peaceful relations with Georgia (with the exception of the Georgian–Ossetian conflict of 1918–1920). Georgia targeted Russian peacekeepers. It was reported ten were killed and 30 were wounded. However, it was later reported around 2,000 civilians and 71 Russian peacekeepers were killed.

Within hours of the attack on civilians in South Ossetia, Russia demanded an emergency session of the United Nations Security Council. A few hours later, Russian leader Putin warned there would be “retaliatory measures” in response to the attack. In addition, Dmitry Medvedev, recently elected as president, said Georgian actions in South Ossetia would not go unpunished.

Russia’s envoy to NATO, Dmitry Rogozin, said the Georgian leader, Mikhail Saakashvili, was encouraged by NATO at a summit in Bucharest. Rogozin said the attack was “an undisguised aggression accompanied by a mass propaganda war.”

Georgia moved to block access to the Roki Tunnel, the only passage between South Ossetia and Russia. “However, before this could happen, Russia entered the war, with the support of almost the entire population,” writes Christian Wipperfürth for Global Research.

“Within two days after the beginning of the war, defeat was already apparent, and Georgia claimed that its own operations had been carried out in reaction to a Russian attack.”

Saakashvili told CNN Russia “is waging war against Georgia,” an assertion plainly at odds with the facts.

“What is playing out in the Caucasus is being reported in US media in an alarmingly misleading light, making Moscow appear the lone aggressor,” author F. William Engdahl wrote at the time.

The USG, under the sway of Bush neocons, accused Russia of “bullying” Georgia while ignoring the fact the conflict was precipitated by Georgia with its illegal act of aggression.

The defeat of Georgia did not settle the matter. In 2012, the president of South Ossetia informed international intermediaries activity near South Ossetia’s border suggested Georgia was preparing a new war, according to RT.

Leonid Tibilov told the representatives of the European Union, OSCE and United Nations that South Ossetian intelligence possessed serious information that the Georgian side was building fortifications and creating ammunition dumps in the villages near the border between the two countries. He added that such events invoked thoughts that Georgia plans [as a USG-NATO proxy]… military action against the people of South Ossetia.

In fact, NATO and the USG have planned destabilizing conflict across the span of Russia’s western border for some time. This was apparent prior to Russia’s SMO in Ukraine. In January 2022, during a NATO meeting, USG Secretary of State Antony Blinken and NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg issued brazen statements indicating, according to a summary by Anti-Bellum,

Russia has the choice of capitulating to NATO’s terms and demands regarding the ongoing war in Ukraine (and implicitly the return of Crimea) and NATO’s absorption of any former Soviet republics not already in the bloc or NATO will revert to its role as the military alliance it has been for 73 years: it will employ the military expedient against Russia. As it has not hesitated to do in Europe, Asia and Africa in the past twenty-three years.

The current government in Tbilisi, in the opinion of the USG and its NATO attack dog, is far too friendly with Russia, and therefore a USAID-spawned color revolution is required.

If the current street violence in Georgia successfully overthrows the government, NATO membership for Georgia will be fast-tracked. South Ossetia will once again be brutally attacked, as ethnic Russians in the Donbas and elsewhere in Ukraine were mercilessly attacked after the USG-orchestrated 2014 coup in Kyiv.

The “protests” in Georgia have little to do with the aspirations of the Georgian people, as disingenuously claimed, or a previously tabled bill designed to eject USAID and its subversive NGOs (subsequently withdrawn).

The objective, as publicly stated by USG war boss Lloyd Austin, is to “weaken” Russia.

In the case of Georgia, following the conflict in Ukraine, the plan is to tie down Russia in a two-front war for an indeterminate amount of time, and thus hope the Russian people will turn against Putin and the government. This will not happen.

The USG is looking for a repeat of the Soviet defeat and retreat from Afghanistan, a climatic event that we are told resulted in a Russian “Vietnam” and the fall of the Soviet Union soon thereafter.

Russia, while somewhat naive in the past and preferring to hedge its bets, is now fully aware of the existential threat it faces. It is acting accordingly. The Russian economy is now on a war production footing, ready to face the inevitable.

Meanwhile, in the “collective West,” death merchants are unable to produce enough armaments to help Ukraine fight to the “last Ukrainian,” and it will certainly be unable to supply Georgia with the required amount of armament and munitions required to push Russia out of South Ossetia.

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This article was originally published on the author’s blog site, Kurt Nimmo on Geopolitics.

Kurt Nimmo is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from the author