Meanwhile, Russia taunted the United States by blowing up its ally’s military bases and boasting Georgia will never get back the rebel enclaves of South Ossetia and Abkhazia.
The Kremlin’s troops sabotaged airfields and depots in Georgia to cripple the battered state’s U.S.-trained military.
And the former Red Army humiliated their beaten foes by one minute withdrawing from Georgian territory and then re-entering it, just to prove that they still could.
At least five explosions rocked Gori as Russian troops went about disabling Georgia’s ability to fight a future conflict.
Again it was the innocents who suffered most as the few remaining citizens in the abandoned city were targeted.
A steady, dejected trickle of Georgian refugees fled the front line in overloaded cars, trucks and tractor-pulled wagons, heading to the capital Tbilisi.
One Soviet-era car carried eight people, including a mother and a baby in the front seat. The open back door of a small blue van revealed at least a dozen people crowded inside.
There was also a tense stand-off between frustrated Georgian special forces, desperate to hit back, and battle-hardened Russian troops from Chechnya at a checkpoint on the outskirts of the city.
Around midday, Russian tanks sped towards the checkpoint and Georgian police quickly retreated behind their own forces.
Outside the town, hundreds of Georgian tanks, artillery and armoured personnel carriers massed on the main east-west highway.
Soldiers dozed in the sunshine by their vehicles awaiting the order to advance.
But in a throwback to darker Cold War times, Moscow seems intent on taking its time to withdraw its vastly superior forces, in a deliberate snub to President Bush’s decision to raise the stakes by ordering U.S. forces to the region.
He sent American military aircraft loaded with humanitarian aid.
U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice issued another urgent call on Russia to honour the ceasefire as she headed to Tbilisi to have a final version of the truce agreement signed by the Georgian president.
But even as she spoke, Russian troops were making themselves at home in the country, including the Black Sea port city of Poti which hosts an oil terminal key to supplying fuel to Western Europe.
The Russian troops in Gori told us they would stay put ‘until Mr Putin says so’, adding they were in no hurry and mockingly praising the ‘beautiful scenery’ around them.
Moscow made it clear that the Black Sea state can wave goodbye to ever seeing its two breakaway provinces, South Ossetia and Abkhazia, becoming part of Georgia.
Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov rammed home the point by declaring that the world ‘can forget about any talk about Georgia’s territorial integrity’.
President Dmitry Medvedev vowed to act as ‘protector’ to the two pro-Russian regions and met their leaders in the Kremlin, telling them: ‘You have defended your territory. The truth was on your side. That is why you have been victorious.
‘The people of South Ossetia suffered genocide and it will take years, maybe decades, for these wounds to be healed.’
The incendiary talk a week after the war began dashed both Georgian and Western hopes that the region could return to the status quo before the bloodshed which has left hundreds dead and thousands of refugees on both sides.
It looks as if the Soviets ed have indicated where their line is – they want to keep South Ossetia and Abkhazia and set up puppet regimes. The swagger is back. And so is an arrogance on the world stage they rarely displayed in the old days.
Neither Russia nor the rest of the world is the same as it was during the Cold War, but it seems as if they are acting and making decisions as if it were. The bully has his victory over the little kid next door with taunts and chest beating. But he ends up alone and isolated, eventually humiliated defeated by scorn.
Like the bully, the Soviets lost.
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This post was written by bobsikes on August 14, 2008
