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August 25, 2008

Security Zones and Check Points

William D. Zeranski
Points of views vary regarding military withdrawal from Georgia, because the Russian government states it is in compliance, while Georgia and the US at the very least, do not concur.  

Russia says it has fulfilled a pledge to withdraw its combat troops from Georgia in line with a ceasefire deal.

But Moscow says it intends to maintain a peacekeeping presence of 2,600 troops in "buffer zones" around the breakaway regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia.

The Georgian government has denounced the move as unacceptable.

The White House said checkpoints and buffer zones were "definitely not part of the agreement", and called for an immediate withdrawal of Russian troops.

The "buffer zones" extend far beyond any pre-existing security zones, and the BBC's diplomatic correspondent, Jonathan Marcus, says Western diplomats fear that Moscow is determined to define the parameters of the interim security arrangements in its own terms.

It's been said that an aggressor always sets the terms, but an added rub is "the extraordinary vagueness of the EU-brokered ceasefire deal, which speaks only of "additional security measures" in "the immediate proximity of South Ossetia" - proximity being defined as a distance of "several kilometres"."  Not surprising, there is now a difference of interpretation.   "[A] a senior Russian general said the situation remained unstable," but again, it's all about interpretation.  The Russians accuse "Georgia of planning further military operations," while it has already been recognized that the Georgian military is in no position resist anyone following the Russian four day blitz, and Georgia simply wants the invading force out. 

In South Ossetia, Russian troops erected 18 peacekeeping posts in the "security zone" and planned to build another 18 peacekeeping posts around Abkhazia. A total of 2,600 heavily armed troops the Russians call peacekeepers will be deployed in those regions.

Russia is staking out positions far beyond the bounders of South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

A top Russian general on Saturday said his country's forces will continue to patrol a key Georgian Black Sea port even though the city lies outside the 'security zones" where Russia claims it has the right to station soldiers in Georgia.


[...]Poti, the Black Sea port, is outside the buffer zone for the Abkhazia conflict, [Anatoly] Nogovitsyn [one of Russia's deputy chiefs of General Staff ] said Russian troops who have set up positions on the city's outskirts won't leave and will patrol the city.

The port city of Poti is a strategic site and has undergone a $200 million port development project.  Russian soldiers have set up check points and continuingly patrol the city.  "Russian forces also set up a checkpoint near Senaki, the home of a major military base in western Georgia," and far deeper in the interior of the Georgia nation.

If setting up multiple check points and categorizing large swaths of land as security zones is the Russian government's interpretation of compliance, the US and the West better start advancing their own game of compliance before Georgia is "complianced" out of existence.

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