Ukraine: Georgian Background to the Western “Invasion” Hysteria

The BBC reported in its June 2013 article titled, “Five years on, Georgia makes up with Russia,” that (emphasis added):  On 8 August, Georgia will mark the fifth anniversary of the outbreak of the war. It lasted only five days but it was disastrous for Georgia.  The war began with an operation by Georgia, which hoped to seize territory that had been outside its control since the early 1990s.  Initially successful, it did not take Russia’s army long to retake the area and push deeper into Georgian territory, stopping just short of the capital, Tbilisi.

In hindsight, it was easy for the BBC and other news outlets to admit Georgia provoked the conflict that at the time, was framed as the “Russian invasion of Georgia.” In Contrast, hysterical articles from 2008, like the Daily Mail’s “Georgia ‘overrun’ by Russian troops as full-scale ground invasion begins,” featured outlandish war propaganda aimed at demonizing Russia and absolving both the West and their client regime led then by Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, of a conflict of their own design.

Russia at the time, was not “invading” Georgia – but rather pushing back US-trained, armed, and backed Georgian forces from their own armed invasion into South Ossetia. It was an engineered provocation designed to test Russian resolve and chip away at Russia’s territorial integrity as well as its influence along its immediate peripheries.

With tensions building in Ukraine, after Western-backed Neo-Nazis, ultra-nationalists, and other assorted bigots, hooligans, and militants overran the elected government in Kiev, the “Russian invasion of Georgia” narrative has been reanimated, admissions of its inaccuracy quickly forgotten, and is being used as an analogy to peddle the newly christened “Russian invasion of Ukraine” narrative.

However, once again, Russia is not “invading” anything. Long before the West began sowing political chaos in Kiev, Russian troops had long been permanently stationed within the country. Ukraine, and in particular, eastern Ukraine including the Crimea peninsula, share a common heritage, history, linguistics, socioeconomic interests, and defense agreements both past and present.

The BBC itself reports in its article, “Ukraine crisis: Does Russia have a case?,” that (emphasis added):

Under the terms of its agreement with Ukraine, Russia is entitled to have 25,000 troops on the peninsula and currently has an estimated 16,000 deployed there. But these troops have to remain on base. Pro-Russian troops have been deployed across Crimea. Moscow insists they are local self-defence forces, but there are widespread reports that they are from Russia.Clearly, the presence of Russian troops in Ukraine, already stationed there permanently long before the West began destabilizing the country are in line with the 1994 Budapest Memorandum. Clearly the covert destabilization of Ukraine by Western backers, as well as both economic and diplomatic coercion via engineered regime change in Kiev to subordinate Ukraine to the West’s (EU’s) own interests is in direct violation of the treaty.  The BBC peddles the notion that Russian troops – beyond those already legally stationed there – have been deployed across Crimea. However Russia has officially denied this, and the BBC fails to prove otherwise, simply citing unqualified “widespread reports,” a dubious practice repeated across the West’s mass media and around its diplomatic circles.