Tobias Ellwood, reporting from Tblisi, is the Member of Parliament for Bournemouth East.
Who is to blame for firing the first shot in this conflict will never be resolved, partly because shots have been regularly exchanged since the 1990s when the West was too preoccupied with Kuwait and then Bosnia to notice regional uprisings in Georgia. Indeed we thanked Russia for offering to sort out its own backyard by sending in ‘peace keepers’ to both South Ossetia and Abkhazia. (Nobody guessed they would be issuing Russian passports to non Georgians within 8 years.)
Access to South Ossetia from Russia is only possible through the 3km narrow Roki Tunnel. Yet by some logistical miracle, over 150 T55 tanks, coincidently participating in Exercise ‘Kavkaz’ north of the border, managed to ‘spontaneously’ react to calls of help from pro-Russian militias and squeeze through the tunnel within hours.
Who fired the first shot is therefore now irrelevant; the escalation of events in Georgia pre-empted by the mysterious explosion of a non Russian pipeline in Turkey a day before hostilities began, suggest this was a conflict waiting to happen and the West was caught off guard.
Russia’s objectives are clear; punish Georgia for looking West, establish de facto control over potential Georgian pipeline routes, seek an alternative warm weather, deep water Black Sea port to Sevastopol (due to be handed back to Ukraine in 2017), and send an unequivocal message to former Soviet colonies not to flirt with the West.
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