August 6:
Russia has accused Georgia of sending warplanes into a Georgia’s breakaway South Ossetia region, with the commander of Russia’s peacekeepers in South Ossetia calling the over-flights a “rude violation” of existing agreements, Reuters reports. A Georgian Interior Ministry spokesman dismissed the Russian claim as “another in a series of lies.” The ministry also denied South Ossetian claims that Georgian forces had shelled a law enforcement outpost and initiated a shootout in the breakaway region. According to Reuters, South Ossetia says two Georgian military vehicles were destroyed in the fighting.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn has been laid to rest in Moscow’s historic Donskoy Monastery, GZT.ru reports. The Nobel Prize-winning writer and dissident died at his home in the Russian capital on August 3rd at the age of 89. The funeral was attended by hundreds of people, including President Dmitry Medvedev, who laid a bouquet of red roses at the foot of Solzhenitsyn’s open coffin.
The New York Times reports that a Russian criminal gang is using software tools normally reserved for computer network administrators to infect thousands of PCs in corporate and government networks with programs that steal passwords and other information. The gang was identified publicly in May by Joe Stewart, director of malware research at SecureWorks, a computer security firm in Atlanta. Stewart, who determined that the gang is based in Russia, was able to locate a central program controlling as many as 100,000 infected computers across the Internet. The program was running at a commercial Internet hosting computer center in Wisconsin.
Russia has said that Iran should be granted more time to respond to a package of incentives that the United States and five other nations have offered Tehran to freeze its uranium enrichment efforts, the Washington Post reports. Russia’s UN ambassador, Vitaly Churkin, dismissed assertions by the United States, Britain and France that Tehran had missed a deadline this week to respond to the offer, which would make a push for UN sanctions inevitable. “We haven’t set any deadlines for their response,” Churkin said. “We have some negotiating opportunities, and rather than focus almost entirely on sanctions we should focus on what those opportunities should be.”
August 7:
Russia’s Foreign Ministry has accused Georgia of preparing for war in South Ossetia after reports of overnight fighting in the region, Reuters reports. Agence France-Presse quotes South Ossetian officials as saying that at least 15 civilians were killed as the region’s capital, Tskhinvali, came under heavy Georgian shelling. The news agency also quotes Gen. Mamuka Kurashvili, the head of Georgian peacekeepers in South Ossetia, as saying that Tbilisi has decided to “restore constitutional order” in the breakaway region. Meanwhile, Georgian Reintegration Minister Temur Yakobashvili said that Tskhinvali “has been surrounded by Georgian forces,” but that Georgia does not intend to “assault” the South Ossetian capital, but rather to “neutralize separatist positions.”
August 8:
According to Bloomberg News, Georgia’s Interior Ministry has said that four Russian fighter jets entered Georgian airspace and bombed the towns of Gori and Kareli near South Ossetia while three Russian military convoys entered South Ossetia and engaged Georgian forces around Tskhinvali. In a televised address, Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili ordered a “mobilization” of reservists and called on all of the country’s 4.6 million people to defend “every meter” of land.
Meanwhile, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, who is in Beijing for the Olympics, told reporters that “countermeasures” would be taken to deal with what he called Georgia’s “aggression.” Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov accused Georgian forces of “ethnic cleansing” and the indiscriminate bombardment of civilians in Tskhinvali, NEWSru.com reports.
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