Georgia

·         On August 22, 2008 Russia revealed having fulfilled a pledge to withdraw its combat troops from Georgia in line with a ceasefire deal. On August 22, 2008 Russia showed intends to maintain a peacekeeping presence of 2,500 troops in "buffer zones" around the breakaway regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia.

·         The Georgian government has denounced the move as unacceptable.

Mission IAS’2009

Truce

·         On August 16, 2008 Russian President Dmitry Medvedev signed the plan for a ceasefire in Georgia that his Georgian counterpart reluctantly agreed to a day earlier, setting the stage for a Russian troop withdrawal after more than a week of warfare.

PEACE PLAN

·         No more use of force

·         Stop all military actions for good

·         Free access to humanitarian aid

·         Georgian troops return to their places of permanent deployment

·         Russian troops to return to pre-conflict positions

·         International talks about future status of South Ossetia and Abkhazia

·         The ceasefire plan calls for Russian forces to withdraw to the positions they held before the fighting broke out in Georgia’s Russian-backed separatist province of South Ossetia.

·         That appears to mean that hundreds of Russian soldiers who had been in South Ossetia previously as peacekeepers will be allowed to return.

·         A simmering conflict between Georgia and Russia erupted on 7 August when Georgia launched an assault to retake its Russian-backed separatist province of South Ossetia.

·         It led to a massive counter-offensive by Russia, with Russia moving deeper into Georgian territory.

·         US-backed Georgia has vowed it will not accept any loss of its territory, but Russia insists that following the recent violence, residents are unlikely to want to live in the same state as Georgians.

• The future of another breakaway region, Abkhazia, is also at stake.

Russia with NATO

·         On August 21, 2008 Norwegian defence ministry shared that Russia has decided to freeze its military cooperation with NATO and allied countries until further notice

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·          Nato was set up in the post-World War II atmosphere of anxiety, largely to block Soviet expansion into Europe.

·          Originally consisting of 12 countries, the organization expanded to include Greece and Turkey in 1952 and West Germany in 1955.

§          Original twelve states - Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Britain, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal and the United States

·          In 1955 the Soviet Union created a counter-alliance called the Warsaw Pact, which dissolved after the break-up of the USSR in 1991.

·          The Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland became the first former Warsaw Pact countries to gain Nato membership in 1999.

·          The next historic step came at the end of March 2004 when Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, republics of the USSR until its collapse in 1991, along with Slovenia, Slovakia, Bulgaria and Romania were formally welcomed as Nato members at a ceremony in Washington.

·          Croatia, Albania and the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia have also applied to join but have not yet been formally invited to do so.

·          At the end of 1995, for the first time ever, it organised a multinational Implementation Force (Ifor), under a United Nations mandate, to implement the military aspects of the Bosnian peace agreement.

·          In 1999 the alliance launched an 11-week campaign of air strikes against Yugoslavia to push Serb forces out of Kosovo.

·          The strikes were the largest military operation ever undertaken by Nato, and the first time it had used force against a sovereign state without United Nations approval.

·          In 2003 Nato took its operations outside Europe for the first time when it assumed strategic command of the UN-mandated peacekeeping force in and immediately around the Afghan capital, Kabul.