MOSCOW, August 8. /TASS/. Russia knowingly decided to intervene militarily into the events in Georgia in 2008 and in Ukraine in 2022 since it had no other choice, Russian Security Council Deputy Chairman Dmitry Medvedev told TASS in an interview.
"Whenever there is an opportunity to resolve a problem by peaceful means, it must be done. But when there is no other choice, one has to respond with force. Regretfully, the governments of both Georgia and Ukraine left no other choice to Russia, by derailing the processes of political settlement. And we knowingly opted for a military interference," he said.
According to the politician, he didn’t have any doubts neither in 2008 nor now about the correctness of his decision to militarily suppress the aggression and to send Russian troops to South Ossetia. He recalled that at that time Georgian troops rudely violated international law and the mandates that the international community gave to Russia as a partner to the peaceful settlement. They fired at people, many of whom had Russian citizenship.
Medvedev stressed that the attack on Tskhinval and other settlements in that republic began "unexpectedly and sneakily", with artillery strikes on residential buildings and civilian facilities, on hospitals and schools, and on Russian peacekeepers. "This is how the Washington-controlled puppet regime decided to impose its understanding of 'democracy' and 'humanism' on South Ossetia and forcibly return it to Georgia at the cost of killing an entire people," the deputy chairman of the Security Council pointed out. "Of course, we had to react. We couldn't just wipe away our tears and bow our heads <...>," Medvedev said.
Medvedev stressed that the rightness of Russia's actions was confirmed by the subsequent course of events, "including the inglorious failure of aggressive doctrines that former Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili tried to implement with such aplomb and pressure". "After a short time he was rejected by his own people. However, he was not idle for a long time and gladly sold out to the ‘orange’ political figures in Ukraine. We can see the fruits of their Russophobic policy in this country today," the politician concluded.