The US Defence Secretary has told Sky News that another Russian attack on Georgia once it has joined Nato would result in an American armed response.
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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.
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Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has issued a stark warning he will send troops back into Georgia should NATO invite the south Caucasus country to join, but this time he promised the consequences “could be much worse,” according to a report from Joseph Farah’s G2 Bulletin.
At a news conference, Medvedev said having Georgia join the North [...]

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Russia’s military leaders, led by tough, politically incorrect, plain-speaking old four-star Chief of the General Staff Gen. Yury Baluyevsky, have been warning over the past two years that future full-scale wars, even including the use of nuclear weapons, are certainly not regarded as inconceivable by their planners.
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Everyone is distracted by the Olympics. The squabbling here on the campaign trail consumes the media. Two presidential candidates and a lame-duck president all are weighing in on foreign policy. No wonder Vladimir Putin thought it was a good time to invade Georgia.
Apparently the Russian prime minister knew exactly what he was doing but [...]

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A six-day conflict in the Caucasus mountains has transformed the international balance of power, with Russia now looking stronger than ever. But what sparked it? Diplomatic Editor Anne Penketh reveals how the Georgian government walked straight into a trap set by Moscow – and considers the consequences of the first war in Europe for a [...]

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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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To some, China’s muscular domination of the Olympic medal table is a powerful allegory of the shifting balance of global power. A far better and more literal testimony to the collapse of the West may be seen in the distinctly weak-kneed response to Russian aggression in Georgia by what is still amusingly called the transatlantic [...]

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The following are internal Stratfor documents produced to provide high-level guidance to our analysts. These documents are not forecasts, but rather a series of guidelines for understanding and evaluating events, as well as suggestions on areas for focus.

Given the speed with which the Russians reacted to Georgia’s incursion into South Ossetia, Moscow was clearly ready [...]

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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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United Nations investigators who examined the downing of an unmanned Georgian reconnaissance aircraft in April have concluded that the drone was struck by a missile fired from a Russian fighter plane, according to an advance copy of their report obtained on Monday.
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The long military standoff in Abkhazia, where a separatist dispute has risked escalating this year to a renewed war, has entered a phase of quiet diplomacy aimed at easing tensions and urging negotiations, according to officials on both sides of the conflict.
No agreement to negotiate has been reached, and the differences between the Abkhaz and [...]

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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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Analysts are actively debating the possible outcomes of an armed conflict between Georgia and the self-proclaimed republic of Abkhazia, which seceded from Georgia in 1992.
Without looking into the most pessimistic scenarios envisioning a nuclear conflict between Russia and NATO, let’s try to predict the possible outcomes of a Georgian-Abkhazian conflict.
In late 2007 the Georgian armed [...]

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Russia’s deployment of extra troops in the breakaway Georgian region of Abkhazia has brought the prospect of war “very close,” a minister of ex-Soviet Georgia said on Tuesday.
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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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Russia’s defence ministry is sending extra peacekeeping troops to two Georgian separatist regions in response to what it calls aggressive moves by Georgia.
“Analysis of the structure of the armed forces in this region leads to the conclusion that a bridgehead is being prepared… for military operations against Abkhazia,” the ministry said.
Russia maintains a peacekeeping force [...]

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