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IGOETI, Georgia -- Russia and its allied forces today destroyed a key railway bridge linking war-weary Georgia's capital to the Black Sea coast, effectively severing all east-west transportation routes within the small country, the Georgian Foreign Ministry announced.

President Saakashvili was forced to accept defeat yesterday as he signed a peace agreement that gives the Russian Army the right to patrol on Georgian soil.

IGOETI, Georgia (Reuters) - A Russian military convoy advanced to a village 45 km (30 miles) from Tbilisi on Friday, in the deepest incursion since conflict with Georgia erupted last week.

Russia is a resurgent competitor for strategic importance. They are going to gobble up as many non-nato countries as possible in order to gain strategic value to counter the USA. Expect more brush wars and trouble from Venezuela, Iran, Russia, and others. WHY ARE WE NOT DEFENDING OUR ALLIES... PUT SOME PARA's INTO TBLISI MR. PRESIDENT!!!!

U.S. to take control of Georgian ports: Saakashvili Wed Aug 13, 2008 1:07pm EDT TBILISI (Reuters) - President George W. Bush's pledge to send aid to Georgia means that the U.S. military will take control of the ex-Soviet state's ports and airports, Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili said on Wednesday.

Solzhenitsyn's Warning The faculty of Harvard University admired Alexandr Solzhenitsyn for his literary achievements, so they were thrilled that he agreed to deliver the university’s 1978 commencement address. But almost as soon as he began to speak, the professors changed their minds: too late. As I wrote this month in Christianity Today, they realized that Solzhenitsyn was charging them with complicity in the West’s surrender to liberal secularism, the abandonment of its Christian heritage, and of all the moral horrors that followed. For example, describing the Western worldview as “rationalistic humanism,” Solzhenitsyn decried the loss of “our concept of...

RUSSIA is preparing to deploy 9000 troops to bolster its forces inside the separatist Georgian region of Abkhazia, reports say. "The group is based on a subdivision of paratroopers. It consists of more than 9,000 troops and more than 350 armoured vehicles,'' Alexander Novitsky, a spokesman for Russia's peacekeeping forces in Abkhazia, was quoted by Interfax news agency as saying. "The strengthening of the peacekeeping force is aimed at ruling out a repetition of the situation Russian peacekeepers faced in Tskhinvali," Mr Novitsky was quoted as saying. Tskhinvali is the capital of South Ossetia, another breakaway region of Georgia where...

After 50 years, an American state secret has been revealed, about the arrest of 12,000 people because of Hoover’s “red” paranoia. The former director of the FBI, Edgar Hoover made plans for the arrest of 12,000 American citizens which he considered to be threats to national security – documents reveals that no longer bear the status of state secret. Hoover sent this request to the president at the time Harry Truman at the beginning of the Korean war during the 50s. He justified the move as necessary for protection from “treason, spies and sabotage”. For now there is no evidence...

Russia’s G5 system of missile defense leaves far behind the S-400 systems that are coming into operation today. It is able to counter space attacks, said Russia’s Air Force Commander-in-Chief Col.-Gen. Alexander Zelin.

Russian and Chinese troops are joining forces this week in the first military exercises by an international organisation that is regarded in some quarters as a potential rival to Nato. Thousands of soldiers and 500 combat vehicles will take part in “Peace Mission 2007”, organised by the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) in the Chelyabinsk region of Russia. Russian officials have also proposed an alliance between the SCO and a body representing most of the former Soviet republics. Scores of Russian and Chinese aircraft begin joint exercises tomorrow before a week of military manoeuvres from Thursday that will include Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan...

MOSCOW, Russia (AP) -- An expedition aimed at strengthening Russia's claim to much of the oil and gas wealth beneath the Arctic Ocean reached the North Pole on Wednesday, and preparations immediately began for two mini-submarines to drop a capsule containing a Russian flag to the sea floor.

Now in their 70s and 80s, children of the victims of Josef Stalin's political repressions remembered one of the darkest pages of Russia's history at a ceremony Wednesday in central Moscow. Several hundred people laid flowers and lit candles to honor the victims of the Great Purge of 1937, when millions were labeled "enemies of the state" and executed without trial or sent to labor camps. The 70th anniversary comes as the Kremlin, focused on restoring Russians' pride in their Soviet-era history, has been trying to soften public perception of Stalin's rule and hushing up the full horror of his...

(On This Day In History) June 26, 1948 : Berlin Airlift Begins In response to the Soviet blockade of land routes into West Berlin, the United States begins a massive airlift of food, water, and medicine to the citizens of the besieged city. For nearly a year, supplies from American planes sustained the over 2 million people in West Berlin. On June 24, 1948, the Soviet Union blocked all road and rail travel to and from West Berlin, which was located within the Soviet zone of occupation in Germany. The Soviet action was in response to the refusal of American...

Russia is deploying a new series of nuclear tipped missiles with warheads designed with the aid of US supercomputers. The new Russian SS-X-27 missile is being moved directly into deployment with an advanced 550 kiloton nuclear warhead made by the Arzamas-16 nuclear design bureau. The original version of the TOPOL - mod 1 version - is designated the SS-25. This mobile missile is quite capable and can reach the US with a variety of weapons packages, including nuclear warheads of Russian design. In early 1997 Russian Atomic energy officials (MINATOM) admitted that an IBM super-computer was purchased from Europe by...

FROM the day Alexander V. Litvinenko, a former K.G.B. officer, died of polonium poisoning in London last November, officials in Russia treated the investigation of his death as if it were simply a matter of bad public relations. They dismissed accusations of Russian involvement as nonsense fabricated by President Vladimir V. Putin’s enemies. Britain last week punctured Russia’s strategy. A decision by the Crown Prosecution Service to accuse another former K.G.B. officer of the murder and demand his extradition pushed Russia out of the international court of public opinion and into the international court of law. If recent history is...

The more Russian leaders pontificate about the importance of democracy and the more they swear to protect democratic values and principles, the less democracy is left in real Russian life. When Moscow bade farewell to the outstanding Russian democrat and reformer Boris Yeltsin last month, many ordinary people told me it was not just Yeltsin who was being buried in the Novodevichy cemetery but Russian freedom itself.

Federal and local law enforcement authorities are investigating a shooting in Prince George's County that critically injured a prominent intelligence expert who specializes in the former Soviet Union. Paul Joyal, 53, was shot Thursday, four days after he alleged in a television broadcast that the government of Russian President Vladimir Putin was involved in the fatal poisoning of a former KGB agent in London... Joyal was shot by two men in the driveway of his house in the 2300 block of Lackawanna Street in Adelphi about 7:30 p.m. Thursday... The identity of the shooters was unknown, and Prince George's police...

Boeing has lost a huge potential order from Russian state-owned airline Aeroflot for 22 787 Dreamliners, company sources said. The deal was all but sealed last June, requiring only the approval of the Russian government. Worth $3.2 billion at list prices, it would have been about $2.2 billion with standard discounts as estimated by aircraft-valuation firm Avitas. But steadily worsening political relations between the U.S. and Russia have killed it and given Airbus a big, though still-unannounced, win for its A350 rival to the 787. In an August interview, Sergei Koltovich, Aeroflot's head of fleet planning, said "both Boeing and...

Russia's foreign minister Wednesday warned the United States not to take military action against Iran. "The Russian foreign minister said Wednesday U.S.-led multinational foreign forces in Iraq must not conduct military operations outside the country, including against Iran," the RIA Novosti news agency reported. "The multinational force in Iraq should abide strictly by the UN Security Council's mandate, which does not provide for any operations outside the country," Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told the Lebanese magazine Al-Watan Al-Arabi in an interview. "The escalation of the conflict and its possible spread beyond the Iraqi borders will inevitably result in catastrophic consequences...

Moscow requests U.S. explanation for Gates' Russia remarks - Kamynin MOSCOW. Feb 12 (Interfax) - The Russian authorities have requested a U.S. explanation for remarks made by Pentagon chief Robert Gates regarding Russia, Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman Mikhail Kamynin told Interfax on Monday. "Acting through the U.S. ambassador in Moscow, we have requested a clarification of the extent to which Robert Gates' remarks match the official position of the U.S. administration," he said. At a U.S. congressional committee meeting last Wednesday, Gates spoke about the uncertainty surrounding the future development of the situations in Russia, North Korea, Iran and China....