The date of 08.08.08 for most residents of Ossetia, as well as for a huge number of Russians, is unlikely to ever be associated with the start of the Olympic Games. That night, when Georgian tanks entered the peaceful and unarmed Tskhinval, everything else ceased to be important. And for a long time it will be remembered not sporting achievements, but tears, pain and tons of lies, from which it is still difficult to extract a grain of truth from under the rubble.
The 2008 war in South Ossetia has a very short history - it lasted less than a week, but its bloody trail touched too many to go unnoticed. Between the rocket fire of the sleeping city that began at midnight on August 8 and the end of the military operation “to force the Georgian authorities to peace” dated August 12, there are two thousand deaths and an almost completely destroyed ancient city.
By the cruelty shown by the Georgian military and by the senselessness of the atrocities committed by them, the war in Ossetia knew no analogues in the modern world. The only comparison that eyewitnesses of those events made was the most terrible episodes of World War II. It was hardly imaginable that in the modern world civilized people are capable of crushing pregnant women and old people with tanks, burning entire families alive and throwing grenades into basements with people. But all this, unfortunately, was. There were bayonets that were thrust by the participants of the elite military units of Georgia into the belly of a pregnant woman, there were tanks that crushed children, and families were burnt from their own cars alive.
It would seem that the war in Ossetia opened the world’s eyes to the insanity not only of the president of independent Georgia, but also to the frank madness of his soldiers, because no matter what order you receive, you only decide to pull the trigger, pointing the gun at the child. But in a way incomprehensible to a sane person, everything happened very differently. The Russian peacekeepers, who at the cost of their lives saved the civilian population of Tskhinval from a meaningless massacre, poured mud from the Western press.
Russia's actions were called aggression against the free Georgian people, an attempt to capture an independent country, and the Russian authorities, with the help of the thickest black colors, turned into tyrants, dreaming of capturing new lands. More than a loyal US attitude towards Georgia forced the Secretary of State to side with Saakashvili and declare that the war in Ossetia 2008 was completely provoked by the Russian side. Western propaganda, as if recalling the days of the Cold War, frantically began to accuse Moscow of all mortal sins, sparing no epithets and creating a picture of almost Nazi Germany. To this day, Western estimates of this war are far from mixed.
Even the shameful facts of the flight of the "elite" troops, who realized that they would have to deal not only with unarmed old people, but also with the real military, were not covered in the foreign press. Meanwhile, the war in Ossetia, like a litmus test, revealed the incomprehensible and inexplicable cowardice of the Georgian military, who left not only the battlefield, but also their permanent dislocation during the stampede.
Against this background, statements by the Georgian authorities that the Russians were trying to reach Tbilisi served as a ridiculous attempt to justify themselves. If they had tried, then they would have reached it - there would hardly have been even a dozen brave Georgian military men who would have stood in the way of a truly professional army.
The war in Ossetia led to sad results: the destroyed city was restored for more than one year, the diplomatic relations of Moscow and Tbilisi ceased to exist as such, but the worst is not the point. The worst thing is the understanding that in today's world there are people who are ready, on the orders of their half-mad leader, to awaken a sleeping beast within themselves and begin to tear, kill and burn, without thinking about the consequences.