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Home > Window on Washington > Archives > 2008 > August > 13 > Entry
Bush Warns Russia: “Cease All Military Activities” in Georgia
President Bush called on Russia Wednesday to “cease all military activities” in the former Soviet republic of Georgia, and to withdraw from the embattled country all Russian forces that have entered since fighting broke out there last week.
And, as Moscow’s critics have called for its expulsion from the prestigious Group of Eight industrial democracies, Bush warned that “Russia is putting its aspirations at risk,” by pressing its week-old military campaign in Georgia, where the capital of Tibilisi was thought to be under potential threat.
Bush sent a giant U.S. military cargo plane to Georgia, saying it was the beginning of what would be a “vigorous and ongoing” effort to provide medicine and other humanitarian aid to a country where an estimated 2,000 have been killed and 100,000 left homeless by the fighting.
“We will use U.S. aircraft, as well as naval force, to deliver humanitarian as well as medical supplies,” Bush told reporters in a hastily called White House announcement.
Bush also dispatched Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to Paris to confer with French President Nicholas Sarkozy on a united U.S.-European response to Russia’s invasion of parts of Georgia.
Bush spent the morning monitoring events in Georgia from the White House situation room and talking by telephone with Sarkozy and Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili.
He said Rice would go from France to the Georgian capital of Tibilisi, to meet there with Saakashvili, as a sign of this country’s “unwavering support for Georgia’s democratic government” and part of a broader campaign to “rally the free world in the defense of a free Georgia.”
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