Russians Losing Propaganda War
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to visit Georgia but she will not be paying a matching visit to Moscow.
By Paul Reynolds
World affairs correspondent, BBC News
The Bush administration appears to be trying to turn a failed military operation by Georgia into a successful diplomatic operation against Russia.
It is doing so by presenting the Russian actions as aggression and playing down the Georgian attack into South Ossetia on 7 August, which triggered the Russian operation.
The visit by the US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to Georgia is a signal of support for Mr Saakashvili.
She has refused to condemn Georgia and barely acknowledged Russia’s point that it had to protect its peacekeeping forces (a battalion-sized unit allowed in South Ossetia along with Georgian and North Ossetian and South Ossetian forces under a 1992 agreement).
Instead she blamed Russia for widening the conflict by bombing beyond what the 1992 deal called the “zone of conflict” in South Ossetia.
She said: “This is something that, had it been about South Ossetia, could have been resolved within certain limits.
“Russian peacekeepers were in the area; that is true. And Russia initially said it needed to act to protect its peacekeepers and its people.
“But what Russia has done is well beyond anything that anyone could say is for the protection of those people and for those peacekeepers.”
German Chancellor Angela Merkel is seeing Russian leaders and while she too will urge them not to challenge borders, the German government has been notably reluctant to blame Russia.
But Not The Guy Below