The Georgian government has officially accused Russian agents of attempting to assassinate President George W. Bush and Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili, and executing several terrorist bombings. The Georgians claim that Russia has infiltrated 120 Russian GRU and FSB intelligence agents to cause unrest in Georgia.
Russian political experts see this accusation as the biggest rupture in Russian/Georgian relations since the collapse of the USSR.
If these outlandish accusations are true, it could lead to the exclusion of Russia from the UN and international sanctions against Moscow.
However, as is often the case with Russia and her relations with the former Soviet republics, things are not quite what they seem and many agendas are at work.
During the Georgian government press conference, the Georgian Minister of the Interior (Georgia's Department of Homeland Security), Vano Merabishvili, said that the February 1st explosions in the Georgian city of Gori were carried out by a terrorist cell directed by the Russian GRU (military intelligence) Colonel Anatoliy Sysoev. The insurgents allegedly received training in Russia and were responsible for several terrorist bombings in recent months.
In the wake of Merabishvili's shocking accusations, the Georgian Parliament's National Security Committee chairman Givi Targamadze (the equivalent of the Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee) said:
"According to our information, there is a large group of infilitrated Russian intelligence agents. We hope that Russia recalls its agents from Georgia. Russia is directly meddling in the internal Georgian conflict"
Targamadze added that Russian intelligence and the former Adgarian leader Aslan Abashidze were complicit in the attempt on the lives of Presidents George W. Bush and Mikhail Saakashvili on May 10, 2005 in the Georgian capitol of Tbilisi. The U.S. Secret Service has been investigating the incident for several months, since it announced that the grenade found near the stage where President Bush spoke to thousands of Georgians was live ammunition and that it would have been close enough to President Bush to pose a serious threat.
Russia has not given any official response yet, because the Foreign Ministry is stunned by such wild accusations from the Georgians. Russian spokesmen off the record have said that the Georgian statements are big lies and nothing else. They point out that the Georgian law-enforcement system is dysfunctional, and Georgian prosecutors and cops have fabricated non-existent criminal cases in order to cover up their own corruption and sloppy work in the past.
Russia is withdrawing its troops from Georgia -- and Georgia wants to speed up this process by finding more and more Russian perfidy to complain about to America and Europe, so that the Americans and Europeans will put more pressure on Russia.
However, Georgia's clever PR strategy has taken a turn for the absurd, and its "sensational" discoveries are so crazy they are not even making it into the Western media. Unfortunately, the Georgian accusations will join a stack of other conspiracy theories about a secret cabal of ex-KGB agents engaged in terrorist activity for dastardly ends (like provoking the Second Chechen campaign).
This article was partly based on information from Gazeta.Ru news website.
