Georgia's president, Mikheil Saakashvili has blamed the western military alliance for his country's war with Russia in 2008.
Interviewed by the Russian Vlast magazine the Georgian president (pictured, right, with former US president George W. Bush) said, reports Bloomberg's Business Week, that the decision of NATO to refuse him a "membership action plan" in April 2008 had sent the "wrong signal" to Russian leaders and encouraged them to enact a long planned attack on his country.
The European Union's Tagliavini Commission into the war of August 2008 published their conclusions into who started the conflict in September last year. Blaming Georgia for breaching international law by shelling Tskhinvali in the breakaway province of South Ossetia and so beginning the five days of intense conflict, they also cited Russian provocations and treaty breaches as contributory factors.
President Saakashvili has veered between saying the Commission's report has vindicated him and saying it is a report produced by a team bribed by Russian energy and media giant Gazprom.
The president also said he had a standing invitation to visit US president Barack Obama in Washington DC. Saakashvili's inability or unwillingness to meet western leaders (on his recent trip to London he did not get to see the British Prime Minister) has caused unfavourable comment at home in recent weeks.
This trailer for Renny Harlin's new film "Georgia" (first aired on Rustavi 2, where else?) does not tell us much about whether the plot grips and the tension rises. We will have to wait for the first reviews.
But it does tell us four things.
Firstly, Andy Garcia does not do Georgian accents.
Secondly, the producers, like those of "Snakes on a Plane", could not manage to get beyond the original "high concept" name for the film.
Thirdly, Harlin loves his military toys.
And fourthly, and probably most importantly, the film - despite all the denials - got masses of state aid.
Harlin has boasted that there are no computer generated image (CGI) special effects in this film. That means every helicopter gunship, every jet fighter, every tank and every AK 74 volley is from a real chopper, jet, tank or machine gun supplied (and in most cases handled) by the Georgian military.
The mind boggles as to how much "Operation Harlin 09" cost the Georgian tax payer, but the sheer level of pyrotechnics in the trailer suggests a massive amount.
We already knew that the state had supplied cash for the production (despite denials) as well as the admitted privileged access to government buildings and Tbilisi locations.
Now it is time we were told the whole truth about just how much taxpayers' money was spent on this project and what - if any - are the chances of any of that cash coming back.
On Saturday Georgian journalists gathered to show their solidarity and support for Vakhtang Komakhidze who has applied for political asylum in Switzerland.
Komakhidze, who previously exposed the Saakashvili regime for faking a military attack by Abkhazian separatists on the day of the 2008 parliamentary elections, says his family have been the subject of death threats since he claimed to have uncovered damaging information about the conduct of the authorities during the August 2008 war with Russia and its South Ossetian clients.
In Tbilisi journalists gathered outside the Swiss embassy and circulated an appeal calling on the Swiss authorities to offer Komakhidze support.
The investigative journalist is now said to be in a holding centre for asylum applicants and told Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, reports Civil.ge, that deciding to apply for asylum was "a very difficult decision, but the situation itself was very difficult.
"Knowing that the authorities were capable of implementing their threats – that’s what made me take this decision."
(Maestro's video caption is: ჟურნალისტებმა ვახტანგ კომახიძის დახმარების მოთხოვნით შვეიცარიის საელჩოსთან აქცია გამართეს)
The Messenger gives more details about President Mikheil Saakashvili's false claims on Georgia and Ukraine's relative economic performance:
The President remembered that in 2004 when he took office Ukraine's GDP per capita was twice more than Georgia's. At that time Georgia had about USD 890 GDP per capita. Today it has a GDP of USD 2,930 and Ukraine's is 2,700. “I could not believe that we were twice poorer than Ukraine. Now we are ahead of them. This does not mean that we should become complacent and do nothing, but our progress is significant,” he said.
In fact the president is clearly comparing Georgia's GDP per head (at nominal prices) from 2008 - $2934 - with the estimated GDP per head of Ukraine in 2010 - $2645. However, if he used Georgia's nominal GDP per head for 2010 - $ 2446 - then Ukraine would still be ahead (it was also ahead in 2008).
These nominal figures are distorted by exchange rate variations in any case. Using the "purchasing power parity" measure (which is based on how much $1 can buy in every country) then Ukraine 's lead is much greater $6786 per head in 2010 compared to $4916 for Georgia. (See the tables on the earlier report for more detail).
Of course in any truly democratic country a political leader who engaged in such crude manipulation of statistics would be shot down in flames. But it is axiomatic such countries are not those where the government controls all the national television channels.
None of this is to say that Georgia's economic performance over the last decade has been anything less than impressive. But the fact the president has taken to quoting figures that do not include the economic impact of the August War and the global downturn is a worrying sign of a lack of focus on today's realities.
In the same speech, the Messenger reports, Mikheil Saakashvili said was "shocked at how accurately the developments of that period [the August 2008 war] are described" in Ron Asmus's book A Little War That Shook The World. It is difficult to know why anyone in the Georgian government is "shocked" by the book - as Asmus faithfully repeats their narrative of events and ignores the documented (by the Tagliavini Commission) Georgian military build up outside Gori in the run up to the Georgian attack on Tskhinvali.
The head of the president's press office Alana Gagloeva has called journalist Vakhtang Komakhidze's claim that the government was more focussed on evacuating her grandmother from the town of Tskhinvali in South Ossetia in the middle of the August war than helping the citizens of the town as the Russian army poured in as "absurd".
"My grandmother left Tskhinvali by taxi. Information about the negotiations between the Tskhinvali regime and the Georgian government on her evacuation is absurd," she is reported as saying by InterPressNews.
In August 2008 Georgian troops advanced into Tskhinvali, the capital of the breakaway region, and were briefly in command of all the town except for some norrthern suburbs. However under Russian assault Georgian troops abandoned the town an fled to the south.
2008.
The president also said he had a standing invitation to visit US president Barack Obama in Washington DC. Saakashvili's inability or unwillingness to meet western leaders (on his recent trip to London he did not get to see the British Prime Minister) has caused unfavourable comment at home in recent weeks.
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