Four months ago today, Georgia’s Upper Kodori (Upper Abkhazia) region was attacked by ground-to-ground rockets and an anti-tank guided missile (ATGM), apparently fired from a helicopter.  The area is the only part of Abkhazia controlled by the Tbilisi government.  UNOMIG has been investigating the incident and is about to publish its report, likely to be inconclusive. The procedures of the Joint Fact-finding Group require consensus among the U.N. staff, Georgia, Russia and the Russian-backed de facto Abkhaz authorities.  This has caused delay, but the bickering is down to one sentence. What already appears between the lines of the latest draft points straight to Russian culpability.

BACKGROUND:  Between the hours of 2110 and 2300 on March 11, three villages in Upper Abkhazia – Adjara, Chkhalta and Zima – came under attack. The challenge to the United Nations Observer Mission in Georgia (UNOMIG) was to piece together the evidence, hobbled by Russian obduracy.

The draft report documents – without comment, of course – that Georgia cooperated fully with the U.N. investigation, while Russia obstructed at every turn.  The U.N. team asked the Russian Federation to provide air traffic control records for the area and time in question.  Moscow replied, “Since there were no Russian Air Force flights on March 11-12 in the mentioned zone, there are no recordings of such flights.”  Instead, Russian representatives quibbled with the authenticity of information derived from Georgia’s radars, which the International Civil Aviation Organization has approved.

Equally telling, UNOMIG asked the Russian government to trace the serial numbers found on munitions fragments, particularly on remnants of the Russian-manufactured AT-6 Shturm or AT-9 Ataka ATGM that struck the first floor of the regional administration building in Chkhalta.  UNOMIG did not receive a reply.

The report proceeds to tell its story through implicit deductions about what happened on the night of March 11.  In the sentence still in dispute, UNOMIG writes, “Except for statements from a majority of witnesses in the Upper Kodori Valley, no further evidence positively and conclusively denies or affirms the presence of helicopters during the incident.”  In other words, except for the evidence of scores – reportedly 63 – witnesses, there is no further evidence of helicopters.

The people of Upper Abkhazia may not be qualified aircraft spotters, but they are presumably smart enough to distinguish between something flying above them and, say, a horse-drawn cart.  Moreover, a Georgian helicopter crew on the ground at the time identified one of the helicopters as an Mi-24.  Nonetheless, Russian representatives are holding out for language that casts doubt on the very presence of helicopters in the valley that night, not to mention from where they came. Then UNOMIG presents the supposedly inexistent further evidence: “The missile appears to have entered the building from a relatively high angle,” an angle only a helicopter could achieve.

In a further twist, although the report is inconclusive about whether helicopters were involved at all, it provides rich hypothetical details about how the helicopters carried out the attack. Terrain and weather made tough flying conditions that night; conditions only Russian pilots and equipment could surmount.  Considering fuel consumption, Mi-24s could not have loitered for the entire time that witnesses reported helicopters to have been in the area.  However, writes UNOMIG, they could have come and gone sequentially or refueled at an improvised location.  And the helicopters must have maintained sophisticated communication with those directing the artillery attack in order to skirt the ground-to-ground rocket barrage.

UNOMIG found 16 impact craters from those rockets, 12 of which it attributes to 122mm 9M22 rockets.  Circumstances rule out man-portable or improvised single launch systems, so the rockets must have come from a BM-21 Grad multiple launch rocket system aboard a Ural truck.  The exact launch point could not be determined, but UNOMIG rules out both maximum-range and close-range fire.  That leaves medium-range fire in perfect timing with the Russian helicopter assault.

IMPLICATIONS:  No matter the fate of the 29 words yet in contention, the UNOMIG report will be inconclusive.  Nonetheless, this report is a step above common UN-speak.  UNOMIG did an excellent job of gathering and analyzing facts – and laying some clear indications between the lines.

Despite clearly indicated Russian obstruction, the drafters left a set of implicit deductions for the attentive reader.  The contentious sentence is a perfect example.  The testimony of 63 witnesses is rather convincing evidence that helicopters were present.  Though circumstances forced the authors to use an awkward turn of phrase, they manage to acknowledge this by saying that there is no “further evidence” [emphasis added] to deny or affirm the presence of helicopters.

Then, nonetheless, they proceed to present further evidence, saying that the ATGM struck the Chkhalta administration building at an angle only a helicopter could achieve.  One must also wonder why the UNOMIG team would have conducted such painstaking analysis of exactly how the helicopters might have carried out the attack, given that they cannot say for sure that there really were helicopters present.

What is clear between the lines is that there were helicopters in Upper Abkhazia that night and – all other possibilities ruled out by logical deduction – they were Russian.  Their well-trained pilots coordinated their movements with the medium-range ground-to-ground rocket attack.  Considering the coordination with Russian helicopters and the range of fire together, the implicit deduction between the lines of the UNOMIG report is that the 122mm rockets were launched from territory controlled by the de facto Abkhaz authorities. This is why Moscow stonewalled the U.N. investigation.

A Russian helicopter hop into Georgia may be considered bizarre, but in the Caucasus, truth is often stranger than fiction.  Furthermore, behavior attributed to Moscow in recent months and years can only be understood with willful suspension of disbelief – dioxin poisoning, assassination by irradiation and defenestration, mysterious gas pipeline explosions are only some examples. Wackiness is part of the plan – Moscow delivers its message, plausibly denying any involvement.  Western countries receive the message, while the episode is so weird that they can plausibly deny having seen anything amiss.

Similarly in the case of the shelling of the Upper Kodori, when UNOMIG officially delivers its report, the document itself will allow western governments either to look away or to draw the inferences from between the lines and face the issue squarely. 

CONCLUSIONS:  Georgia will no doubt seek to raise the March 11 attack on Upper Kodori in the U.N. Security Council.  It should have the unequivocal support of the western countries, particularly the Permanent Members of the Council, France, the United Kingdom and the United States.  For the same reason that there could not be a more explicit UNOMIG report, there can be no formal action in the Security Council – Russia would veto it.  Nonetheless, there should be a thorough airing of the matter and Moscow should get a clear message that this sort of behavior is unacceptable.

If this does not happen, Moscow will understand that western countries continue to tolerate its brand of international juvenile delinquency.  “If Russia thinks it can bomb Georgian territory and get away with it, that is dangerous not just for Georgia, but for all its neighbors – for Ukraine, for Azerbaijan, for the Baltic States,” Georgian Interior Minister Vano Merabishvili recently told the Wall Street Journal.  Eventually, this kind of Russian behavior is likely ignite a blaze somewhere in the former Soviet space that the western countries cannot ignore.

AUTHOR’S BIO:  Ambassador David J. Smith is Senior Fellow at the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies, Washington, and Director of the Georgian Security Analysis Center, Tbilisi.