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Talks this week in Geneva between Russia, Georgia, Abkhazia, and South Ossetia reached a minor milestone with an agreement on "incident prevention" mechanisms intended to give international monitors access to the entire zone of conflict following last year's Russia-Georgia war. But EU sources say it remains unclear whether Moscow and the Russian-backed authorities in Abkhazia and South Ossetia have a genuine desire to see the deal work. The scheme commits both sides to cooperate on preventing security incidents in and around the breakaway regions of South Ossetia -- where Moscow and Tbilisi fought a war in August -- and Abkhazia....

Note: The following text is a quote: https://www.osac.gov/Reports/report.cfm?contentID=96983 "YOU ARE HERE: Home > Reports > Consular Affairs Bulletins > Report Warden Message: Georgia Carjacking; Concerns over Highway Travel CONSULAR AFFAIRS BULLETINS Europe - Georgia 7 Feb 2009" SNIPPET: "U.S. Embassy Tbilisi issued the following Warden Message on February 7: The U.S. Embassy in Tbilisi would like to inform American citizens that an armed carjacking occurred February 7 on the main east-west highway near Igoeti. The vehicle was taken to South Ossetia and a telephone belonging to one of the victims was used to make a ransom demand. While this believed...

TBILISI (Reuters) – Georgia said on Saturday hundreds of Russian soldiers had moved into a disputed Georgian village near breakaway South Ossetia and had pushed out Georgian police, fuelling fears of confrontation. A regional police official and an interior ministry spokesman said between 500 and 600 Russian soldiers were in the village of Perevi, close to the de facto border with the region.

With Russian tanks only 30 miles from Tbilisi on August 12, Mr Sarkozy told Mr Putin that the world would not accept the overthrow of Georgia’s Government. According to Mr Levitte, the Russian seemed unconcerned by international reaction. “I am going to hang Saakashvili by the balls,” Mr Putin declared. Mr Sarkozy thought he had misheard. “Hang him?” — he asked. “Why not?” Mr Putin replied. “The Americans hanged Saddam Hussein.” Mr Sarkozy, using the familiar tu, tried to reason with him: “Yes but do you want to end up like [President] Bush?” Mr Putin was briefly lost for words,...

A car bomb blast near Russia's peacekeeping headquarters in South Ossetia has left six military personnel killed and four others injured. The explosion took place on Friday near the command post of the Russian peacekeepers in Tskhinvali, the capital of the independence-leaning republic. The car, with some quantities of arms in it, was seized earlier in a nearby village, said South Ossetia's press department, AP reported.

The site of Nikozi Church dates back to the fifth century and is known to Georgians as the Church of the First Martyr. ... The Soviets expunged all religious activity there with particular force because Stalin hailed from the nearby town of Gori, where they built the Stalin museum in his lifetime. At the Soviets' demise, Nikozi became again a center of pilgrimage for Georgians. And as the national church came back to life, Nikozi reacquired a bishop who revived the annual mid-August festivities in honor of St. Rajdeny. The fiercest aerial bombardment of the village took place this year...

Russia’s military intervention in Georgia has provoked a storm of negative reactions in the United States and Europe. To most Americans—and apparently to spluttering Bush administration officials—Moscow’s actions came as an unpleasant surprise. Pundits and policy experts immediately began to speculate about the Kremlin’s motives in Georgia and beyond. To Russophobes the answer is clear: the evil empire has been reborn and is on the march. They issued shrill warnings that Moscow’s dust-up with Georgia was just like the Soviet Union’s invasions of Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968. Some even invoked the threadbare 1930s analogy, with Russia playing...

Only Russia and the "states" of South Ossetia and Abkhazia will decide how many troops Moscow can keep on their soil, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said Saturday, signaling the Kremlin will do as it pleases in the separatist Georgian regions regardless of Western demands. The statement was in frank defiance of calls by Georgia, the U.S. and the European Union for a withdrawal of most Russian troops from the breakaway territories, which only Russia and Nicaragua have recognized as independent nations. Thumbing its nose at Georgia and the U.S., South Ossetia rolled what Russian media said were captured American-made Jeeps...

William J. Burns, Under Secretary for Political Affairs Statement before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations Washington, DC September 17, 2008 Mr. Chairman, Senator Lugar, Members of the Committee, thank you for the opportunity to discuss the Georgia crisis and its implications, particularly for our relationship with Russia. The causes of this conflict – particularly the dispute between Georgia and its breakaway regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia – are complex, with mistakes and miscalculations on all sides. But key facts are clear: Russia’s intensified pressure and provocations against Georgia – combined with a serious Georgian miscalculation – have resulted...

BRUSSELS, Sept 17 (Reuters) - Georgia will keep pledges to field troops in Western peacekeeping missions in Afghanistan and Iraq despite Russia's crushing of its military during the South Ossetia war, a top official said on Wednesday. "We will still keep our commitments to have our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. That is very important to our country," Georgian national parliament chairman David Bakradze told a news conference in Brussels. "We hope our allies and other friendly countries will help us to recover our infrastructure," he added. Georgia withdrew all of its 2,000 soldiers in Iraq last month after the...

Thus, while Kosovo's status as part of Serbia is unquestionable, South Ossetia and Abkhazia can make a good case they were part of Soviet Georgia but never the current independent state of Georgia. (The same would apply to Transdniestria with respect to Moldova and Nagorno-Karabakh with respect to Azerbaijan. When will they follow suit?) In Kosovo, Washington sowed the wind, and now Georgia has reaped the whirlwind. Only a return to the negotiating table to address comprehensively Kosovo, South Ossetia, Abkhazia and similar trouble spots elsewhere can prevent this malignant precedent from spinning further out of control with incalculable consequences...

The West Begins to Doubt Georgian Leader Five weeks after the war in the Caucasus the mood is shifting against Georgian President Saakashvili. Some Western intelligence reports have undermined Tbilisi's version of events and there are now calls on both sides of the Atlantic for an independent investigation. But now, five weeks after the end of the war in the Caucasus, the winds have shifted in America. Even Washington is beginning to suspect that Saakashvili, a friend and ally, could in fact be a gambler -- someone who triggered the bloody five-day war and then told the West bold-faced lies....

Georgia produced telephone intercepts on Tuesday it said proved Russian armour entered Georgia hours before the start of a Georgian attack that Moscow said forced it to send in its troops. The release of the intercepts comes as both Moscow and Tbilisi wage a diplomatic and public relations campaign to prove the other side fired the first shot in a war that killed hundreds of people and caused widespread devastation. Russia said the evidence was "not serious". The force movements referred to in the intercepts may, it said, have been a routine rotation by Russian peacekeeping forces already operating in...

Georgia has released intercepted telephone calls purporting to show that part of a Russian armored regiment crossed into the separatist enclave of South Ossetia nearly a full day before Georgia’s attack on the capital, Tskhinvali, late on Aug. 7. ... The back and forth over who started the war is already an issue in the American presidential race, with Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska, the Republican vice presidential candidate, contending that Russia’s incursion into Georgia was “unprovoked,” while others argue that Georgia’s shelling of Tskhinvali was provocation. Georgia claims that its main evidence — two of several calls secretly recorded...

14 September 2008 | 13:50 | Source: Tanjug TURIN -- Former Spanish PM Jose Maria Aznar urged Brussels to tread carefully in the Caucasus. "In the case of South Ossetia and Abkhasia, the European Union must not repeat the mistake it made with Kosovo," Aznar said in Turin on Saturday. "The violation of Serbia's territorial integrity on the grounds of ethnic criteria was a serious mistake," Aznar, who heads the Spanish Foundation for Social Studies and Analyses, told an international conference and added that as a result, Russia had been brought into a good position to support the independence of...

A rebel US Republican congressman has sided with Russia in its invasion of and brief war with Georgia, putting himself at odds with the Bush administration and politicians of both parties. "The Russians were right; we're wrong," Rep. Dana Rohrabacher said at a hearing of the House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee. "The Georgians started it; the Russians ended it," he added. Mr Rohrabacher claimed that unidentified intelligence sources had assured him that Georgia started the fighting that began on August 7 when Georgia's military tried to re-establish control over its breakaway, pro-Russian province of South Ossetia. Russia joined the...

'In the grim present, humanitarian intervention feels like an idea whose time has come and gone," laments Michael Ignatieff in a review-essay in the current issue of The New Republic. Mr. Ignatieff may be right. I regret that being right alarms him. It reassures me. The birth of organizations such as the International Criminal Court (ICC) at a UN-sponsored conference in Rome alarmed me much more 10 years ago. This was around the days when, in Mr Ignatieff's words, "the idea that all states have a 'responsibility to protect' civilians at risk of ethnic cleansing or massacre in other states...

Georgia attack is 'Russia's 9/11' Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has described Georgia's assault on South Ossetia as Russia's 9/11. He said the world had learnt lessons from the attacks in the US on 11 September 2001 and hoped the same would happen after events in the Caucasus. Reports say Russian troops are showing signs of preparing to pull back from inside Georgia. This is in line with a ceasefire deal brokered by French President Nicolas Sarkozy on Monday. However, a Georgian Interior Ministry spokesman cast doubt on the preparations, saying: "There has been no sign of a withdrawal." 'Changed world'...

GROZNY -- Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov has accused the United States of fomenting unrest in the Caucasus and emboldening Georgia to launch an attack on South Ossetia. Speaking to members of the Valdai Discussion Club at his residence near Grozny, he said Russia's crushing defeat of Georgian troops in their brief war was the appropriate response. Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili "was dancing to someone else's tune," Kadyrov said during the one-hour briefing. "He started a war, an inhuman war. ... The United States was testing Russia through Georgia, and Russia reacted decisively." He backed Moscow's recognition of South Ossetia and...

Russia today slapped down its would-be satellite state of South Ossetia after the leader of the breakaway Georgian province claimed it would become part of the Russian Federation. No sooner had Eduard Kokoity, president of the tiny enclave, alarmed Western powers by announcing it sought to join Russia, than the Kremlin issued a strenous denial and forced him to reverse his statement. South Ossetia was recognised only a few days ago as an independent state by the Kremlin following last month’s bitter war. But Mr Kokoity said this morning that independence was no longer his goal. Instead he told a...