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

“Welcome to Europe” is a new weekly feature section to Gazeta introduced in July. It is inspired by a successful daily section “Welcome to Poland” focused on home issues and debates.

The new section features only original and exclusive narrative stories and interviews accompanied by the photos taken mainly by Gazeta’s staff photo reporters.

What’s also unusual: articles to this section are not submitted only by Gazeta’s foreign correspondent or foreign news desk journalists. Editors launched an internal competition and everybody, including local reporters from the smallest bureaus in the homeland, can enter with a story idea and get a budget to make it. This is both a way to promote talents in the newsroom and train people.

“Welcome to Europe” opened with a story about the Landstuhl Regional Medical Center operated by the US Army in Germany, probably the largest military hospital in the world. It serves as the nearest treatment center for wounded soldiers coming from Iraq and Afghanistan.

Gazeta’s correspondent Bartosz Wielinski was the first Polish journalist who entered the LRMC and told the story about what he had seen there and what the US Army tried to hide.

The photo above shows the command center at the Landstuhl hospital. Miguel Cubano who coordinates the transport of wounded soldiers stands at the board with flight schedules. On this day there were 8 new patients expected from Aghanistan and 10 from Iraq.

And here is the full two-page spread:

Mission

Gazeta’s foreign news desk editor Bartosz Weglarczyk wrote in his column:

“Europe does not end on the Union, its Parliament and Commision. We send our reporters to Germany, Sweden, Italy, Spain and other countries to discover the world not-covered by other Polish media…

We send our reporters to Europe because we want to check how it really is different from Poland. And how it is similar. What is better there than here? What is worse? What do we like in this Europe and what would we like to bring back home? And what do we see as unacceptable? Today, or maybe never? …

We send our reporters to Europe because we want to let this Europe to astonish us and to understand it.”

Stories

Just to give a taste of this new section, here is a glimpse on recent stories that have been published in print and online:

• Landstuhl. Hospital on the periphery: Finally, a chaplain reaches the ambulance. He stands by the head of a wounded soldier, on the left side – as the procedure demands. He whispers directly to the soldier’s ear: “Welcome to Germany. You are in good hands.” The soldier does not answer, he is unconscious. Sometimes there is so many wounded soldiers on the board of American transporter air craft C 17, that Landstuhl runs out of beds. (Written by Bartosz T. Wielinski)
• To smell Naples and die: Piles of dusts at the Garibaldi monument in the very heart of old Naples smell like rotten fish. Nearby, at the Pasquale Mancini street one feels putrid tomatos. Behind the corner, at the Umberto I Avenue, a passerby is hit by a fetor of rotten meat. Holding our noses we are walking around one of the most beautiful cities of Italy and Europe. (Written by Tomasz Bielecki)
• They took away our kids for a smack: The social worker said that for the children’s protection she would not disclose where the children were. And added that Polish migrants should find a good lawyer. “It must have been a mistake,” thought Eve. “Maybe again I got something wrongly in Swedish”. (Written by Agnieszka Czajkowska)
• Barcelona. A fight with tongues: Spanish nationalists are on a war with Catalonian ones. If one would leave them alone on a battlefield, they would certainly kill each other. (Written by Maciej Stasinski)

Invitation for readers’ tips and stories

Gazeta’s editors invited readers to discover Europe together. The paper asked simply:

“Are you traveling around European countries? Are your friends working or studying there? Tell us about Europe that makes you astonished. What irritates you? What excites? What makes you proud?”

There is a good reason for this approach. Since 2004 when Poland joined the European Union, up to two million Poles migrated to the Western countries to find better jobs. Gazeta has a good relationship with them – it runs several websites for its readers abroad and publishes foreign supplements in cooperation with the Daily Telegraph in UK and the Irish Independent.