From the New York Times editorial:
President Bush spent years looking the other way while Mr. Putin harassed opponents, stifled a free press and bullied his neighbors. (A new report that suggests that Georgia had no reason to send troops into a breakaway enclave is disturbing, but not surprising, and still doesn’t justify Moscow’s brutal invasion.) While he was busy looking into Mr. Putin’s eyes, Mr. Bush also ignored Russia’s list of grievances — many of them illegitimate, but not all. Mr. Medvedev and Mr. Putin now seem determined to push their way to the top of Mr. Obama’s very crowded agenda. We suspect that they will get a more receptive hearing if they stop trying to bully their own people — and everyone else.
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Let’s get clear about a few things.1. Russia had no authority from the UN to insert military forces even in Ossetia, must less Georgia proper, regardless of what Georgia was doing in its own territory. Georgia never set one toe across any Russian border, and nobody has accused it of doing so. Therefore, Russian actions in Georgia constiute wanton aggression.2. Nobody disputes that rebels in Ossetia fired rockets repeatedly into Georgian territory, giving Georgia the right to respond at any time under basic principles of international law. Month after month, Georgia declined to do so, even as it watched Russian forces massing on the Ossetian border and on the border with Abkhazia.3. Nobody disputes, and formal international proceedings have determined, that Russia committed acts of war against Georgia by shooting down Georgia’s surveillance aircraft and firing shells into Georgia proper.4. The “reports” the Times refers to don’t say Georgia had “no reason” to attack Russia. They say that Georgia was careless with its artillery, in exactly the same manner that Russia was careless, and both caused civilian casualties that might have been avoided. And they say that the tiny number of Western observers who were present on August 7 don’t have direct evidence of Ossetian shelling that day. But they admit that shelling could have been occurring without their notice.5. Nobody disputes that the president of Georgia went on national TV and called for ceasefire, or that no matching declaration came from the Russian side. Nobody disputes that Russia has never taken any action to quell the Ossetian attacks, and to the contrary has participated in them. Nobody can claim that Russia acted as a peacekeeper in the region, it acted as a partisan of the Ossetians.6. The “reports” at issue are coming from European voices of appeasement, the same voices that argued Hitler had “legitimate grievances” and that if accomodated war would be avoided. These are the same voices who have turned a blind eye to the massive election fraud and abrogation of democracy undertaken by the Putin regime, and done nothing at all to demand justice for victims of the Putin regime such as Mikhail Khodorkovsky.
The Russian leadership often makes deliberately acerbic statements on the heels of politically significant events in the United States, most likely in order to force a response that enables them to gauge the climate. I highly doubt that they place missiles in Kaliningrad and that Putin makes a triumphant return to the presidency (not to say that he isn’t the real source of power right now). Obama was smart not to say anything about Medvedev’s speech and, inexplicably, was not questioned on this subject during his first press conference.