The West is treating Ukraine as a proxy against Russia to be used and abandoned, the same way it previously treated Georgia, Moscow’s deputy envoy to the UN Dmitry Polyansky has said.
In a social media post marking the anniversary of Georgia's attack on villages in South Ossetia, Polyansky tweeted that August 8 is a “sad day in Georgian history.”
Then-Georgian president Mikhail Saakashvili had taken control of the country in the US-backed ‘Rose revolution’ in 2003. In August 2008, as the world’s attention was on the Beijing Olympics, he launched an attack on the breakaway region of South Ossetia, hoping to overwhelm the Russian peacekeeping battalion stationed there since the 1990s.
“It’s very hard to rectify the bloody mistakes of [the] Saakashvili regime which acted in 2008 as a puppet of the West. Now Saakashvili is in prison in Georgia but his poisonous legacy is still felt,” Polyansky noted.
Moscow’s quick reaction to the assault surprised both Tbilisi and Washington and Georgia’s Western-trained military was dismantled within five days. Saakashvili then lost the 2012 election and went to the US and then to Ukraine, after the US-backed coup in Kiev.
Turning his attention to the current conflict, Polyansky claimed “Kiev regime is doing a far more nefarious mistake right now naively hoping that the West will not abandon it after NATO’s proxy war with Russia until the last Ukrainian.”
“And Washington and its allies are still bringing death and devastation to the post-Soviet space in their futile neo-colonial geopolitical crusade against Russia,” he added.
Russia’s president at the time, Dmitry Medvedev, also commented on the anniversary of the conflict. In a Telegram post, he said that Saakashvili had been a proxy of the West, “which was trying to stir up the situation in the immediate vicinity of Russia’s borders even then.”
Washington and its vassals are “once again waging a criminal war by proxy” against Russia, Medvedev added. “Just like in August 2008, our enemies will be crushed, and Russia will achieve peace on its own terms.”
The US and NATO have sent over $100 billion worth of weapons, equipment and ammunition to Kiev, as well as cash to keep the Ukrainian government afloat, while insisting they were not a party to the conflict with Russia. Earlier this year, they supplied modern Western tanks to the Ukrainian military, in expectation of a grand spring-summer offensive that would push Russian forces into the sea.
Kiev launched the offensive in early June, but has achieved little while losing 5,000 vehicles and 43,000 soldiers, according to Russian Defense Ministry estimates. Earlier this week, senior US and Western officials told CNN that it was “extremely, highly unlikely” the Ukrainians could make enough progress on the battlefield to change the balance of the conflict.