On the ground in Georgia, about 25 miles outside the capital along the main highway, four Russian armored personnel carriers passed a Russian checkpoint at the village of Igoeti on Monday and headed in the other direction, toward Tbilisi. Soldiers were piled on top, cradling Kalashnikov rifles.
As they drove by, one old man, Koba Gurnashvili, stepped into the road and yelled at them, "Where do you think you're going!" One of the soldiers yelled back, "To Tbilisi."
But they did not, instead turning up a side road leading to a village near the border with South Ossetia. They stopped at an intersection blocked by Georgian police cars.
The Russian commander climbed off his tank and began arguing with the Georgian police officers. He said he had orders to move up the road; a Georgian officer said he had orders to remain on the road, and asked to call his superiors for guidance. The Russian said, "You have three minutes to move your cars."
The two argued for a few minutes more. Then the police officers stepped away from their cars, stone-faced, with their keys. The tank smashed aside the cars and kept going.
You have to be a near-fatal blend of stupid and stubborn to think, in such a situation, that a tank commander is not going to have any qualms about squishing your car. But that is what the Georgians have been since they started their moronic war: Stupid and stubborn.UPDATE: Watch the video. It is in Georgian, but apparently the Russian commander is trying to get the Georgians to move their fuzzmobiles. The Georgians locked the cars and refused to move them. The Russians just shoved two of them out of the way with their BMPs.
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For those who are wondering, I saw the video of this incident on Italian TV (really!). The Russian vehicles involved were four BMP-1 IFV's (think M-2 Bradley except it predates the M-2 by close to twenty years) and a Jeep that the Russians had apparently "liberated" from the Georgians (it was way too shiny to be Russian, all the Russian gear looked like it was rusty 30 year old gear -- pretty much because it was). The BMP-1 looks sorta like an overgrown tank, it does have a turret mounting a 76mm cannon. The Russian commander aimed at the split between two vehicles and shoved them aside, except the vehicle on his left got caught on his fender and was hauled down the road for about 20 yards before finally coming to rest. And the policeman in question didn't just take off his hat before spitting, he threw his hat at the ground. The last part of the clip was a close-up of the hat, sitting in the mud.
I was just laughing my head off. That was the stupidest thing I ever saw anybody do -- try to take on what might as well be a tank while armed with nothing but a 9mm popgun and a few cop cars. I don't understand any of Italian, Russian, or Georgian, all of which were being spoken in this clip, but I certainly understand stupid, and there was plenty of that on display here.
Those Georgian cops were lucky that the Russian commander was in a good mood. I mean, taking on four tanks armed with 76mm cannons and at least twenty soldiers armed with AK74 automatic rifles when what you have is four cop cars and four cops armed with 9mm pistols? Madness!
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