VLADIKAVKAZ, Russia (Reuters) – A year after Russia defeated neighbour Georgia’s military bid to retake a pro-Moscow region from rebels, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said yesterday the war had redrawn the map of the Caucasus for good.
At a ceremony to decorate officers and soldiers who took part in the five-day conflict, Medvedev said the 58th army had prevented the extermination of South Ossetians, who broke from Georgian rule in the early 1990s.
Russia recognised South Ossetia and Abkhazia, a breakaway Georgian region on the Black Sea, as independent states after the conflict and has guaranteed their security.
“Last year’s events have finally redrawn the political map of the Caucasus,” Medvedev told the 58th Army, which spearheaded Russia’s riposte, in the North Ossetian capital Vladikavkaz.
“The recognition of South Ossetia’s and Abkhazia’s independence was the only possible solution,” he said. “This decision will not be reviewed.”
Medvedev later told a delegation of South Ossetians that recognising their region as an independent state had been a tough — but correct — decision.
“The recognition was a difficult step. Until now there are illusion among some of our international partners that this was a temporary decision, that Russia is manoeuvring, that it can be forced into giving up recognition,” he said.
“There will be no rowing back, we will move only forward.”
The war killed at least 390 civilians and at its height displaced more than 100,000. An unfulfilled ceasefire pact, sporadic gunfire and the withdrawal of monitors from pro-Western Georgia’s two rebel regions keep alive the risk of renewed war.
