OVER the weekend, photographic proof emerged that the Russians used mur derous Chechen mercenaries to do their dirtiest dirty work in Georgia: The ragtag unit in question is so vicious that, last April, Chechnya’s Russian-installed “president” demanded it be disbanded.
War snaps taken by Russian photojournalist Arkady Babchenko have been circulating among intelligence personnel. The shots [...]

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The Georgian crisis will have specific repercussions on the Middle East. There is less of a chance that the United States and Russia will be cooperating to stop Iran’s nuclear program. There is a greater chance that Russia will wage a more ambitious and aggressive policy, including selling advanced weapons systems to Iran and Syria. [...]

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Over the past eight years, starting with the rise of Mr Putin, Russia has recovered both its confidence and its capability. But to do what?
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The key to Russia’s success is linking political and economic issues, and playing one country off against another. If the EU wants to help Georgia, Russia uses Greece to block it. [...]

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Russian military jets flew over the breakaway Georgian province of South Ossetia this week in order to prevent imminent “bloodshed,” the Russian foreign ministry said Thursday.
“The need arose to take urgent and effective measures to prevent bloodshed and to keep the situation peaceful,” the ministry said in a statement.
“To determine the circumstances, Russian air [...]

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Russia wants Georgia, its former Soviet possession, to stay out of NATO so badly it is risking armed conflict to support the breakaway region of Abkhazia. In the past two months, Russia has sent almost 1,000 troops into Abkhazia, established direct economic ties with it and downed an unmanned Georgian spy plane.
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Russia was accused yesterday of stoking separatist tensions as part of a campaign to prevent the former Soviet republics of Georgia and Ukraine joining Nato.
Georgia said that Russia was arming rebels in the breakaway region of Abkhazia to provoke a war and scupper its bid to join the military alliance.
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Moscow also angered Ukraine by [...]

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Russia was effectively charged with committing an act of war yesterday after a United Nations report concluded that one of its planes shot down a Georgian reconnaissance aircraft over Georgia last month.
The inquiry’s conclusions gave the first independent credence to claims by Mikheil Saakashvili, Georgia’s president, that Russia was responsible for a series of aggressive [...]

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A more plausible explanation of Russia’s propaganda offensive and increase in the numbers of both regular and irregular forces in Abkhazia is not fear of a Georgian attack, but plans for the opposite: an attempt to retake the Kodori Gorge. This would humiliate, perhaps topple, Georgia’s pro-Western president, Mikheil Saakashvili. Russia would see it as [...]

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NATO warned Russia Wednesday to stop undermining Georgia’s territorial integrity, after Moscow announced it would send more peacekeepers to two rebel Georgian regions.
Russia’s move, to counter what it said was the massing of Georgian troops near Abkhazia and South Ossetia, raised concern in the United States while the European Union has said that any [...]

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GEORGIA and Russia agree upon one thing: the situation in the breakaway province of Abkhazia is bad and getting worse. Georgia, an ex-Soviet republic with close links to America, says that Russia is illegally putting more troops in the region. Last week it produced video footage of what looks like a Russian warplane shooting down [...]

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