Gori in the Georgian-South Ossetian conflict (2008)

Air raids and the entry of Russian troops into the city

Gori is located 30 kilometers south of Tskhinvali , where in August 2008 there was an armed conflict that also spread to the main part of Georgia, as a result of which Gori, which was one of the main strongholds of the Georgian army at the beginning of the conflict, was bombarded several times by the Russian air force forces . On August 9, during the bombing of Georgian military facilities by Russian aircraft, according to the Georgian side, 60 civilians were killed, residential buildings were destroyed ^[3] . Correspondents of the newspaper Kommersant , who visited Gori, cite the following:

At dawn, we barely drove into Joseph Stalin’s hometown, we saw three soot-black five-story buildings with window frames turned outward. Gray windows poured from the broken windows. At the playground, swaying from side to side, stood a tall man with glasses and silently smoked. To our question how everything happened, he answered with his own:
- Where are you from?
- Journalists from Moscow .
This answer immediately infuriated him, and he turned to a cry:
- Tell your Moscow that if she wants to fight, then let her fight in Tskhinvali! And what about Gori? Or does it haunt Putin that the Georgians born here once ruled him Russia?
In the courtyard of one of the houses stood a gray Gazel minibus with cracked glass. In the cabin, cowering, sleeping four men. Hearing the crackle of glass under our feet, two of them woke up and one out.
- Journalists, huh? - asked one of them, who later called himself Jimscher. “Well, let's go show our sights.” See this iron cake? Yesterday morning it was a Zhiguli. When the first bomb fell, a husband and a pregnant wife were sitting in it. He was 28 years old and she was 27. Try to find at least something from them.
Then Jimscher led us to his porch, to what he thought was worth our attention. At the entrance, rubber slippers and a hand torn off at the elbow were lying under the windows.
- Here my neighbors stood when the bomb fell. Four covered in one second, ”said Jimscher.
Then we went up the stairs and entered all the doorways in a row - most of the doors tore off the hinges. Jimscher’s apartment, it can be said, survived: in an old sideboard there were even a couple of whole glasses, and the next one burned down. From the balcony, Jimscher pointed to the military unit, which was the purpose of the air raid. Of the ten buildings, one was damaged. The remaining three bombs fell into residential buildings. How many people died, no one knows for sure, they say 10-15 ^[4] .

On the evening of August 10, after a warning from the Georgian Ministry of the Interior that Gori was in unsafe territory, part of the civilian population left the city. On the same day, a group of Russian troops consisting of two airborne assault companies on the BMD, reinforced with four self-propelled guns "Nona" and 4 armored personnel carriers, moved towards Gori ^[5] . The next day, the city was abandoned by the Georgian army. The result of the hasty retreat was a large number of abandoned vehicles and units of heavy military equipment. Georgian troops retreated to the capital of Georgia - Tbilisi . On the approach to Gori, Russian paratroopers shot a Georgian military convoy near the village of Variani ^[6] . On August 12, Russian planes bombed the city again ^[7] . The commander of the 104th air assault regiment G.V. Anashkin recalls:

The next morning they were given the task of performing a maneuver, occupying the heights and capturing the television tower of the city of Gori. It was the 12th. By eleven o'clock all the heights were taken, the TV tower was captured. As a result of the capture of the TV tower, the personnel of the Georgian anti-tank battery were destroyed and anti-tank guns were captured. They were deployed near the forest. It so happened that we jumped in and were above them, and from above shot down them and destroyed. We switched to defense at these heights. On the night of the 12th, it was announced that the hostilities of the Russian troops had ceased.

At night on the thirteenth, it was seen how a large amount of Georgian equipment was leaving Gori. Our combat vehicles have a small firing range, so firing was pointless. Their departure was panicky - they threw so much equipment, so much ammunition. When ours entered the barracks, they knocked down the locks from the arms rooms, intact machine guns in the pyramids. The equipment is right in storage. Some equipment is built into columns, so they are abandoned. There were even columns with running engines, with full ammunition and fueling. We captured the prisoners, and they told us that after our breakthrough and the battle, a rumor circulated at the military base that two Russian divisions had invaded Georgia and were sweeping away everything in its path, cutting everyone without mercy. It was a real panic ^[8] .

On August 14, Gori is jointly controlled by the Georgian police and Russian troops. Then the Russian military began the elimination of equipment and ammunition left by the Georgian military from weapons depots outside of Gori.

Post-war situation and the withdrawal of Russian troops

On August 15, The Guardian newspaper wrote that, according to the residents of Gori, controlled by Russian troops, soldiers continue to take revenge on the Georgians ^[9] . The correspondent of the Radio Liberty service in Gori claims that on August 18 he saw a drunk Russian soldier threatening civilians with a machine gun, and he saw Russian looters carrying a computer out of school. According to him, in the city openly there are gangs of robbers, the occupying Russian forces, which introduced a curfew in Gori, do not take measures to combat them ^[10] . As stated by the representative of the Russian Ministry of Defense, all the talk that Gori was destroyed and there is looting is not true ^[11] .

On August 22, 2008, the last Russian military units left Gori, and the city came under the complete control of Georgian law enforcement agencies. The nearest checkpoint of the Russian troops (on August 23, 2008) near Gori was five kilometers from the city, in the village of Karaleti ^[12] .