Russia puzzled, angered at West's Georgia response

By Janet McBride

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia's leaders are angry and frustrated at the West's perceived failure to understand their war with Georgia -- so frustrated that they spent hours this week personally making their case to foreign media and experts.

Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said he was surprised and aggrieved by the "strength of the West's propaganda machine".

"It goes beyond the borders of logic and reason," he told the annual meeting of the Valdai Club of reporters and academics on Thursday.

At the end of his three-hour briefing in the Black Sea resort of Sochi, Putin implored those present to ensure Russia's story was heard.

In similar vein, President Dmitry Medvedev reflected on Friday that "all problems are communication problems".

"If Georgian authorities had had the wisdom to speak to us, we could have avoided conflict. Where there is no communication there is war," he said over lunch in the luxury GUM department store opposite the Kremlin.

The comments by Russia's leadership tandem represented a concerted attempt to shift Western perspectives on the conflict with Georgia, whose President Mikheil Saakashvili condemned "Russian aggression" in a stream of interviews to the world's media during the crisis.

It is not hard to trace the root of Russian anger. To Medvedev, Georgia's attempt to seize back control of the pro-Moscow breakaway region of South Ossetia on Aug 7-8 was 'Russia's 9/11'.

Medvedev and Putin share a conviction Russia's response -- sending its troops deep into Georgia -- was correct and proportionate, a view rarely reflected in Western media.

"NEW COLD WAR"

There the parallels were with Germany's 1939 invasion of Poland. The talk was of a new Cold War and jostling between Moscow and the West for control of vital energy corridors.

Much Western coverage portrayed Russia as stamping on pro-Western Georgia in the same way that the Soviet Union squashed reformist movements in communist Hungary and Czechoslovakia by sending in its tanks in 1956 and 1968.

Nonsense, say the Russians.

"We came within a few kilometers of Tbilisi. If we had wanted to we could have taken it in four hours. But we didn't want that," Putin said.

In vivid language, Medvedev said Russia had needed to ensure its military victory left no room for Georgia's army to regroup and attack again.