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Bingo! Mark Steyn is looking more and more like a prophet, as demography is beginning to do its dirty math on societies with low birth rates. Russia is both sick and childless, and it is dying. In order to defend its mineral-rich homeland from Muslim and Chinese hordes multiplying on its borders, Russia knows it must expand. South Ossetia and Abkazia are just the first new pieces in the new Russian empire. The Bear must expand his territory and population, or he will die.

If Russia is ever hard up getting "boots on the ground, say to defend Siberia from a Red Chinese invasion, they will use the "Great Equalizer," nukes and things will get messy.

It reminds me of "Red Dawn" where Patrick Swayze asked, "who's on our side?" and Powers Boothe (my favorite actor) said a weakened, starving UK surrounded by the USSR and "600,000,000 screaming Chinamen." Swayze asked, "I thought there were a billion," and Boothe tosses some whiskey on the fire and it flared up.

NM,

Most excellent memory you have there.
But you left out the part part I like best: ‘there were’.

Col. Andy Tanner: ...The Russians need to take us in one piece, and that’s why they’re here. That’s why they won’t use nukes anymore; and we won’t either, not on our own soil. The whole damn thing’s pretty conventional now. Who knows? Maybe next week will be swords.
Darryl Bates: What started it?
Col. Andy Tanner: I don’t know. Two toughest kids on the block, I guess. Sooner or later, they’re gonna fight.
Jed Eckert: That simple, is it?
Col. Andy Tanner: Or maybe somebody just forget what it was like.
Jed Eckert: ...Well, who *is* on our side?
Col. Andy Tanner: Six hundred million screaming Chinamen.
Darryl Bates: Last I heard, there were a billion screaming Chinamen.
Col. Andy Tanner: There *were*.
[he throws whiskey on the fire; it ignites violently, suggesting a nuclear explosion]