The point wasn't, could not be, missed in Moscow and "Russia sent a strong warning to the United States Thursday [April 2] about supporting Georgia in the U.S. ally's efforts to rebuild its military following last year's war.
"The Foreign Ministry said helping arm Georgia would be 'extremely dangerous' and would amount to 'nothing but the encouragement of the aggressor.'"
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A Russian news source reported "Turkey provided the Georgian Army, Air Force and Special Forces with unspecified military equipment, shortly after Georgia was visited by a high-ranking US General on Monday" in addition to having previously provided "60 armoured troop-carriers, 2 helicopters, firearms with ammunition, telecommunication and navigation systems and military vehicles worth $730,000," and that "more armour, Pakistan-manufactured missiles, speedboats and other ammunition is planned for delivery in the near future."
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Days later at the NATO Summit in Strasbourg the Alliance complemented the Pentagon's enhanced support of Georgia.
NATO reiterated its intention to absorb Georgia - and Ukraine - "when the countries fall in line with the alliance's standards."
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Among the bloc's "standards" are two preconditions for full membership worth recalling: The absence of territorial conflicts and of foreign (non-NATO) military forces in candidate countries. Abkhazia and South qualify doubly as "problems that must be resolved" as does the Crimea in general and the Russian Black Sea Fleet in Sevastopol in particular with the Ukraine.
Hence Saakashvili, flanked and coached by the Pentagon's second-in-command, fulminating about the "complete de-occupation of Georgia's territory and expelling the last soldier of the enemy from our country."
In line with this plan, the Strasbourg summit issued a statement that "NATO will continue supporting the territorial integrity, sovereignty and independence of the South Caucasus countries and Moldova," and "NATO declares its deep concerns over the unsettled conflicts in the South Caucasus countries [Abkhazia, South Ossetia and Nagorno-Karabakh] and Moldova [Transdniester]."
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NATO Spokesman James Appathurai, in issuing the mind-boggling declaration that the Alliance wouldn't tolerate "spheres of influence" in post-Soviet space, stated: "We consider that South Ossetia and Abkhazia are integral part of Georgia. The issue of the territorial integrity is a very serious problem. NATO always supports the territorial integrity of countries." (As to the last sentence, see references to Kosovo and Montenegro above.)
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Georgia returned the favor by vowing to turn the Sachkhere Mountain Training School into a Partnership for Peace [NATO] Training Center and by hosting the annual NATO South Caucasus Cooperative Longbow/ Cooperative Lancer exercises beginning on May 3 with troops from twenty three nations.
The importance of Georgia, and of its neighbor Azerbaijan, is assuming heightened, indeed urgent, value for two not unrelated reasons: The activation of trans-Eurasian energy projects intended to knock Russia out of petrochemical sales and transit to Europe and the escalation of the war in South Asia.
At the 60th anniversary Summit, within the general framework of Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer's demand that "The North Atlantic Treaty Organization, now more than ever, must hold together to solve some of the world's most pressing problems," was a renewed pledge to "protect Europe's energy security."
The main focus of the summit, however, was to formalize plans for the large-scale escalation of the war in Afghanistan and now in neighboring Pakistan.
Plans for unprecedented Western-dominated oil and gas pipelines from the eastern end of the Caspian Sea through the South Caucasus and the Black Sea north to the Baltic Sea and further on to all of Europe - and for the hub of that nexus, Turkey and the South Caucasus, to connect with more pipelines emanating from the Middle East, North Africa and eventually the Gulf of Guinea - have been addressed in some detail in an earlier article, Global Energy War: Washington's New Kissinger's African Plans.
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But a brief overview may be in order.
In October of 1998 United States Secretary of Energy Bill Richardson officiated over a meeting with the heads of state of Azerbaijan, Georgia, Turkey, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan to launch the Ankara Declaration, a formalization of plans for the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline to run for 1,768 kilometers from the Caspian to the Mediterranean.
It was planned to be the world's longest fully functioning oil pipeline as the Soviet and Comecon era Friendship Pipeline (4,000 kilometers) was already in decline and moreover was to be supplanted by extension of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan project through Ukraine to Poland and the Baltic Sea, the Odessa-Brody-Plock-Gdansk route.
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