Mikheil Saakashvili had long planned a strike to seize back the breakaway region of South Ossetia, former Georgian defense minister says. Irakly Okruashvili, Georgia's leading political exile, said that the United States was partly to blame for the war, having failed to check the ambitions of what he called a man with democratic failings.
Saakashvili's days as Georgia' President were now numbered, he noted in an interview in Paris.
Okruashvili, a close Saakashvili ally who served as defense minister from 2004 to 2006, meanwhile underscored that he and the president worked together on military plans to invade South Ossetia and a second breakaway region on the Black Sea coast, Abkhazia. "Abkhazia was our strategic priority, but we drew up military plans in 2005 for taking both Abkhazia and South Ossetia as well," Okruashvili said.
There was however no immediate reaction from Saakashvili's office to his remarks.