Residents of Georgia tell about horror from bombings during Five-Day War

One of the heaviest memories of the Five-Day War, which ended 10 years ago, for residents of Georgia are linked with Russian air strikes and tanks in the outskirts of Tbilisi.

The "Caucasian Knot" has reported that August 12 this year marked 10 years after the end of the Georgia-South Ossetia armed conflict with the participation of Russia, which went down in history as the "Five-Day War".

In August 2008, there was no depressing sense of war in Georgia, as the "hot phase" of the conflict did not last long, Levan Alapishvili, an employee of the NGO "Centre for Strategic Research and Development", told the "Caucasian Knot" correspondent.

"The fear came when Russia began bombing Tbilisi and Kaspi," Mr Alapishvili said.

The start of the war was marked by the bombing of the area of the former aircraft factory, told Anna, a Tbilisi resident. "It was very scary – you see a bomber flying to your house and don't know where to run?" Anna told the "Caucasian Knot" correspondent.

According to her story, all the families that had cars left the city immediately; only those left who had no cars or had nowhere to go.

The situation in Tbilisi was tense; people followed the events mainly by reports of Georgian TV companies; and received a small part of information from the Internet, said Irakli Menagarishvili, an expert at the Centre for Strategic Studies.

He has stressed: "The last couple of days of the conflict passed without too much stress, but it was not clear what could be the end of it. The alarm was caused by the fact that Russian tanks were several dozen kilometres from Tbilisi, and they were in the central part of the country – the region of Kartli. However, soon people stopped worrying that tanks would approach the capital."

This article was originally published on the Russian page of 24/7 Internet agency ‘Caucasian Knot’ on August 15, 2018 at 06:55 pm MSK. To access the full text of the article, click here.