As Russia struggled to rally international support for its military action in
Georgia, Vladimir V. Putin, the country’s paramount leader, lashed out at the
United States on Thursday, contending that the White House may have
orchestrated the conflict to benefit one of the candidates in the American
presidential election.
Russia's prime minister, Vladimir Putin, seen during his interview with CNN in
Sochi, Russia's Black Sea resort. Mr.. Putin has suggested the United States
pushed Georgia toward war and said he suspects a connection to the American
presidential campaign.
Putin Accuses U.S. of Involvement in Georgia Conflict
Mr. Putin’s comments in a television interview, his most extensive to date on
Russia’s decision to send troops into Georgia earlier this month, sought to
present the military operation as a response to brazen, cold war-style
provocations by the United States. In tones that seemed alternately angry and
mischievous, he suggested that the Bush administration may have tried to create
a crisis that would influence American voters in the choice of a successor to
President Bush.
“The suspicion would arise that someone in the United States created this
conflict on purpose to stir up the situation and to create an advantage for one
of the candidates in the competitive race for the presidency in the United
States,” Mr. Putin said in an interview with CNN.
He added, “They needed a small victorious war.”
Mr. Putin did not specify which candidate he had in mind, but there was no
doubt that he was referring to Senator John McCain, the Republican. Mr. McCain
is loathed in the Kremlin because he has a close relationship with Georgia’s
president, Mikheil Saakashvili, and has called for imposing stiff penalties on
Russia, including throwing it out of the Group of 8 industrialized nations.
Mr. Putin offered scant evidence to support his assertion, and the White House
called his comments absurd. But they underscored the depth of the rift between
Moscow and Washington over the Georgia crisis, which flared three weeks ago
when the Georgian military tried to reclaim a breakaway enclave allied with
Russia. They also suggested that the Russian leader was deeply concerned about
the possibility that Mr. McCain, widely viewed here as having a strong bias
against Russia, could become president.
Only last spring, Mr. Putin, the president at the time, held a summit meeting
with Mr. Bush in which the two expressed personal affection for each other and
sought to smooth over tensions in the bilateral relationship.
Russia has been struggling to persuade the outside world to back its action in
Georgia. On Thursday, China and four other countries meeting with Russia for
the annual summit meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, a security
alliance, declined to back Russia’s military action in a joint communiqué.
Mr. Putin’s interview came after his protégé, President Dmitri A. Medvedev,
spoke to several foreign news outlets this week as part of a concerted move by
the Kremlin to counter Georgia’s public relations offensive in the
international media. Mr. Medvedev’s tone was less harsh, though he also
criticized the West.
On Thursday, Mr. Putin, now prime minister, also said Russian defense officials
believed that United States citizens were in the conflict area supporting the
Georgian military when it attacked the separatist region of South Ossetia.
“Even during the cold war, during the time of tough confrontation between the
Soviet Union and the United States, we have always avoided direct clashes
between our civilians, let alone our servicemen,” Mr. Putin said. “We have
serious reasons to believe that directly, in the combat zone, citizens of the
United States were present.”
“If the facts are confirmed,” he added, “that United States citizens were
present in the combat zone, that means only one thing — that they could be
there only on the direct instruction of their leadership. And if this is so,
then it means that American citizens are in the combat zone, performing their
duties, and they can only do that following a direct order from their leader,
and not on their own initiative.”
In Washington, the White House spokeswoman, Dana M. Perino, dismissed Mr.
Putin’s remarks. “To suggest that the United States orchestrated this on behalf
of a political candidate just sounds not rational,” she said.
She added, “It also sounds like his defense officials who said they believe
this to be true are giving him really bad advice.”
A senior Russian defense official, Col. Gen. Anatoly Nogovitsyn, said at a news
conference in Moscow on Thursday that Russian forces had found a United States
passport in a ruined building near Tskhinvali, the capital of South Ossetia.
The position, he said, had been occupied by Georgian Interior Ministry forces.
“What was the gentleman’s purpose of being among the special forces and what he
is doing today, I so far cannot answer,” General Nogovitsyn said, holding up
what he said was a color copy of the passport. He said members of the Georgian
unit had been killed, and the building destroyed.
When the war broke out, the United States had about 130 military trainers in
Georgia preparing Georgian troops for service in Iraq. The American Embassy in
Tbilisi said these trainers were not involved in the fighting; about 100 remain
and are assisting with the delivery of aid to Georgia that is arriving on
military planes and ships.
General Nogovitsyn said the passport was in the name of Michael Lee White of
Texas, but gave no information on whether Russians believed that he was a
member of the United States military. The United States Embassy in Georgia told
The Associated Press that it had no information on the matter.
Mr. Putin said in the CNN interview that Russia had thought that the United
States would prevent Georgia from attacking South Ossetia, but suggested that
he now believed that the Bush administration encouraged Mr. Saakashvili to send
in his military.
“The American side in fact armed and trained the Georgian Army,” Mr. Putin
said. “Why hold years of difficult talks and seek complex compromise solutions
in interethnic conflicts? It’s easier to arm one of the sides and push it into
the murder of the other side, and it’s over. It seemed like an easy solution.
The thing is, it turns out that it’s not always so.”
The Georgia conflict has become a flash point in the United States presidential
campaign, with Senator McCain assailing what he refers to as “revanchist
Russia” and asserting that he is far more qualified to handle such a crisis
than the Democratic candidate, Senator Barack Obama.
Mr. McCain has long been friendly with Mr. Saakashvili, who has said he talks
to Mr. McCain regularly. Mr. McCain’s top foreign policy adviser, Randy
Scheunemann, has worked as a lobbyist on behalf of the Georgian government, and
Mr. McCain’s wife, Cindy, traveled to the Georgian capital, Tbilisi, this week
on a humanitarian aid mission.
All these ties, combined with Mr. McCain’s criticism of Russia, have earned him
a kind of notoriety in Moscow. When Parliament passed a resolution this week
urging that Russia recognize the independence of the two breakaway enclaves,
some lawmakers not only praised the courage of the South Ossetians, but also
threw a few barbs at Mr. McCain.
Andrew E. Kramer contributed reporting.
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