Georgian war veterans describe protracted shelling before Five-Day War

Ten years after the August 2008 events, Georgian war veterans told the "Caucasian Knot" how the acute phase of the conflict, which went down in history as the "five-day war," began and developed. War veterans said that large-scale military operations began not on August 8, but on August 6, when the villages of Nuli and Avnevi were destroyed by mortar fire, and on August 2, wounded law enforcers began to enter the military hospital.

Residents of Georgia believe it was Russia who started the war in 2008, the "Caucasian Knot" correspondent was told by retired Vice-Colonel Nugzar Gogorishvili, the former chief of the PR Department of the Gori Hospital.

"Starting from August 2, the hospital received wounded people from the borderline, mostly policemen and less often civilians. Most of them were wounded by snipers," he said.

Meanwhile, according to Nugzar Gogorishvili, starting from August 2, the villages of Nuli, Ergneti, and Ditsi were constantly shelled from mortars. "For several days, they used mortars. However, on August 6, when I was at home, on the outskirts of Gori, I heard a series of violent explosions, and the house shook ... That was already artillery shelling," states Nugzar Gogorishvili.

David Makishvili, the former reconnaissance commander from the fourth brigade of the Georgian armed forces, also refers to August 6 as the date of the beginning of the war. "We were urgently summoned and taken to the vicinity of Gori, since soldiers from the Georgian peacekeeping battalion in South Ossetia were killed that evening," he said.

David Makishvili and Nugzar Gogorishvili state that on August 6, the artillery shelling was conducted from positions not far from the base of Russian peacekeepers in South Ossetia.

"It was easy to determine that, since the peacekeepers who came under fire and the policemen saw where the fire came from," David Makishvili said.

According to him, "it was an ordinary provocation to force the Georgian troops ... to answer, and then Russia would have the opportunity to claim that Georgia was killing peacekeepers."

This article was originally published on the Russian page of 24/7 Internet agency ‘Caucasian Knot’ on August 13, 2018 at 05:06 am MSK. To access the full text of the article, click here.