Mindy Cooper's List: We from Georgia

• . Putin said "I'll teach these guys a lesson; they really are encroaching on my sphere of influence." And Saakashvili apparently believed that if he tried to unify his country he'd get backed up by the West
• The European Union, incidentally, in its usual half-hearted way, said "we will call an international conference,
• But the objective of what NATO and the European Union was doing was to say, "We are going to bring these people into Euro-Atlantic institutions, into a globalized society
• the EU decided yesterday, to suspend meetings on the EU-Russia partnership program.
• "We're going to send a team to look, and we're going to judge whether the Russians are following the six points of the cease-fire agreement with French President Sarkozy, and decide whether it's worth having this EU-Russian summit on November 14."
• "If you want to be a partner in the outside world, and by God you need it, you can't behave like this."
• Putin therefore has to judge whether to throw away opportunities to be engaged in the outside world.
• At the moment, Russia is Saudia Arabia with trees.
• If Putin says, "Having my sphere of influence is more important than being involved in the outside world," then Russia's going to pay a huge price for it.

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• wider implications for Euro-Atlantic stability and security
• We welcome the agreement reached and signed by Georgia and Russia, through the diplomatic efforts of the European Union, the OSCE and the US, to end the hostilities and to bring about a political solution to the conflict.
• These measures are intended to assist Georgia, a valued and long-standing Partner of NATO, to assess the damage caused by the military action and to help restore critical services necessary for normal public life and economic activity. Georgia's recovery, security and stability are important to the Alliance. NATO will continue to cooperate with Georgia in the framework of the Partnership for Peace and Georgia’s Individual Partnership Action Plan with NATO, and will review any additional Georgian requests for assistance. We also welcomed the fact that a number of our governments have indicated that they will actively support measures to help the economic reconstruction of Georgia.
• We remind all parties that peaceful conflict resolution is a key principle of the Partnership for Peace Framework Document.
• Russian military action has been disproportionate and inconsistent with its peacekeeping role, as well as incompatible with the principles of peaceful conflict resolution set out in the Helsinki Final Act, the NATO-Russia Founding Act and the Rome Declaration.
• We call on Russia to take immediate action to withdraw its troops from the areas it is supposed to leave
• under the six-principle agreement signed by President Saakashvili and President Medvedev¹. The Alliance is considering seriously the implications of Russia’s actions for the NATO-Russia relationship. In 2002, we established the NATO-Russia Council, a framework for discussions with Russia, including on issues that divide the Alliance and Russia. We have determined that we cannot continue with business as usual. We call on Moscow to demonstrate – both in word and deed – its continued commitment to the principles upon which we agreed to base our relationship.

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• Pifer says the current state of relations left not much in the U.S. diplomatic tool-kit to use against Moscow for its "disproportionate use of force in Georgia" which he said went beyond international norms of behavior
• Russian message was not just about South Ossetia. That was a broader signal to Georgia, and to other neighbors, that Russia is serious about having influence in its neighborhood. That is going to be an issue that we're going to have to deal with.

• Moscow’s initial moves into South Ossetia as large-scale violence broke out there on 7-8 August were in part a response to a disastrous miscalculation by a Georgian leadership that was impatient with gradual confidence building and a Russian-dominated negotiations process.
• But Russia’s disproportionate counter-attack, with movement of large forces into Abkhazia and deep into Georgia, accompanied by the widespread destruction of economic infrastructure, damage to the economy and disruption of communications and movement between different regions of the country, constitutes a dramatic shift in Russian-Western relations. It has undermined regional stability and security; threatened energy corridors that are vital for Europe; made claims with respect to ethnic Russians and other minorities that could be used to destabilise other parts of the former Soviet Union, with Ukraine a potential target; and shown disregard for international law.

• approximately 25,000 ethnic Georgians who have been unable to go back to their homes in South Ossetia.
• , but the actions of Ossetian militias, who systematically looted, torched and in some cases bulldozed most ethnic Georgian villages, were particularly egregious. The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) called those abuses “ethnic cleansing” Human Rights Watch cited ample evidence to label them “crimes against humanity” and “war crimes”.
• In violation of its 7-8 September agreement with the EU, it has prevented the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) from continuing pre-war activities in South Ossetia, including monitoring and implementation of a rehabilitation and reconstruction program. It justifies its positions by saying “new realities” prevail, because it recognised the August independence declarations of South Ossetia and Abkhazia and concluded bilateral security agreements.
• The presence of excess troops and lack of a security regime have made it impossible for even some IDPs who lived in the former Russian “buffer zones” in Georgia to feel secure enough to return to their homes. The 2008 wave of IDPs presented the Georgian authorities with a serious challenge, when they were already struggling with at least 200,000 IDPs from the conflicts in Abkhazia and South Ossetia of the early 1990s.
• comply fully with the ceasefire agreements, in particular by withdrawing from areas its troops did not occupy before 7 August 2008 (the Akhalgori district of South Ossetia, Perevi village on the Georgian side of the administrative border with South Ossetia and the Kodori Gorge region of Abkhazia);
• EU Monitoring Mission (EUMM)
• OSCE Mission.

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