World on the brink of a cold war

Poland’s Gazeta Wyborcza has just started a new series of features that tell the story of recent war in Georgia from many different perspectives: Georgian, Russian, American, Polish, French, German, Ukrainian and Belarussian ones.

Ongoing occasional skirmishes between Georgians and separatists from South Ossetia escalated to a war early in the morning of 8 August 2008, when Georgia launched a large-scale attack against South Ossetia.

This was followed by a Russian counter-attack into Georgian territory. In five days of fighting, Georgian forces were ousted from both South Ossetia and Abkhazia, another break-away region. Moscow recognised an indepdence of these two regions and its troops are still occupying parts of Georgian territory.

Western countries, including Poland, criticized Russia. The European Union’s leaders gathered today in Brussels for an emergency summit on the crisis.

Also today a new series has started in Gazeta Wyborcza. Our best foreign correspondents and reporters have looked behind doors of those in power and are going to tell this war’s stories from different perspectives:

• Wojciech Jagielski wrote about Georgian president Micheil Saakashvili: why did he started this war? What did he want to win? What did he loose? What is he going to do now? We published this feature story on Monday.
• Waclaw Radziwinowicz wrote about Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin and president Dmitry Medvedev: how they dragged Saakashvili to the trap. We will run this story on Tuesday.
• Marcin Gadzinski wrote about American president George Bush: what was the role of his holidays in this war? We are going to publish this story on Wednesday.
• Miroslaw Czech is writing about Polish president Lech Kaczynski: why did he go to Tbilisi during the war and blustered Russia when speaking on streets? This is a story for Thursday.
• Jacek Pawlicki is writing about French president Nicolas Sarkozy and German chancelor Angela Merkel: what are they fighting for? We will publish it on Friday.
• And on Saturday we are going to tell the stories of Ukranian leader Viktor Yushchenko and Belarussian one – Alexander Lukashenko: what are they afraid of?

These long narratives are accompanied by:

• personal diaries of a Russian journalist who was embedded to Russian troops that entered South Ossetia and a Georgian blogger who was simply trying to survive;
• background stories about ones of the real reasons of this war: oil and gas supplies;
• interviews with analysts and commentators like Moscow’s sociologist Viacheslav Igrunov;
• infographics showing a calendar of war, the major pipelines in the region etc.

Here you see the first part of this series:

 

The series was promoted in the newspaper and on TV. Here is an example of the in-paper promo published last Friday:

Translation: World on the brink of a cold war.

What’s the game of Putin, Medvedev and Bush? What’s the fight of Saakashvili, Kaczynski, Sarkozy, Merkel, Yushchenko and Lukashenko?

Features by foreign correspondents of Gazeta, opinions and comments.

What’s going to happen after this war in Georgia? Will the world fall into another cold war? What would it mean for Poland?

Read from this Monday in Gazeta Wyborcza and on Wyborcza.pl

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