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Jules did a piece about an ordinary Russian’s reaction to the Russo-Georgian War. To give some balance, here are the views of an ordinary American and friend who got trapped in Tblisi.
We finally got back to the US last night, after a harrowing 11 days. Among other things, we got stuck in a column of [...]

A good source for comment on foreign policy in the former Soviet Union is the website of the Eurasia Heritage Foundation, in my opinion Russia’s best think-tank, and certainly the one with the best English language website.
I saw this rather ominous comment there by Alexander Rahr, Russia expert at the German council on foreign [...]

Earlier this week, I wondered if we might soon see European personnel under Russian command in Georgia to help keep (well, keep an eye on) the peace. But Europeans are flexible about this sort of thing. In this hour of crisis, it’s good see that the Norwegian military was able to deploy [...]

At the risk of sounding morbid, it’s now possible to designate winners and losers in the heats of what will hopefully not become a new Olympic discipline: Russo-Georgian Warfare.
The ex-Soviet heat: Between Medvedev and Shakashvili, the winner’s clearly Russia’s new leader who, while having to initially share the stage with ex-president and former champion Vladimir [...]

Alex is keeping us up-to-date on the British media’s efforts to tell us what is really going on around the Olympics, but here’s some even braver journalism.  In this new clip Tamara Urushadze, a Georgian journalist, get shot in the arm but keeps broadcasting (mildly fuzzy clip, but not actually that gory).
You need to a [...]

Whilst the US has stolen a march on Europe by deciding to send aid with the US military, this will be palliative and humanitarian, rather than deal with the longer-term reconstruction requirements.
The EU has similarly released funds for humanitarian programmes - which will be needed to help and house the estimated 100.000 refugees. But for [...]

The idea that EU personnel should help keep the peace in Georgia - noted here yesterday but in the air since last week - is gaining traction.  Today, the European Council said that the EU would boost OSCE observers there, but that just means more Euros under the OSCE’s flag.  But the Council left open the [...]

So the war in Georgia is over for now (or as Finnish FM Alex Stubb nicely puts it “traditionally, we will see a few skirmishes, but frontal attacks and positioning will end”).  Stand by for laborious talks on peacekeeping options.  In Moscow, Nicolas Sarkozy offered EU personnel, but with Russian “peacekeepers” and OSCE and UN observers [...]

This is the perspective from my Russian friend, Konstantin, with whom I have had many a foreign policy discussion in the bars of Moscow. He is an educated, well-travelled Russian and I would say his view is in some ways quite typical of the Russian middle class.
My opinion has formed up long ago. There [...]

Daniel may well be right that “The German and French governments need to reflect on how their veto of Georgia’s NATO membership at the Bucharest Summit in April encouraged Mikheil Saakashvili to take unilateral military action, believing nobody else would help him recover territory belonging to Georgia” - but it also leaves open the question, what [...]

Taking a quick tally of where some of my favourite US blogs stack up on the Russian / Georgian conflict, there are some interesting perspectives.  Steve Clemons at the Washington Note is in forceful mood:
The U.S. has displayed a reckless disregard for Russian interests for some time. I don’t like Russia’s swing to greater domestic [...]

In an age when media coverage is such a significant dimension of armed conflict, the question of who’s cast as the goodie and who’s the baddie is not a small one.  So who’s winning the narrative high ground over South Ossetia? 
Until the fighting began, the answer - in western Europe and the US, at least [...]

Following the Georgian War from the Tel Aviv beaches lends a different perspective. The $ 22 million in military exports from Israel to Georgia belie a much deeper security relationship. Numerous ex-IDF generals provide military advice to the Tblisi government while Israeli hardware – especially pilotless drone aircraft- has been shipped by the plane loads.
But [...]

In Georgia, official websites are being defaced with pictures comparing President Saakashvili to Hitler… The blog - I Love Bonnie - has this screenshot from the Georgian Ministry of Foreign Affairs site:
Civil.ge has good coverage, or see our snapshot on netvibes.

The international response to events in Georgia is still at the declaratory stage, and some analysts predict a long struggle. It’s not a good sign when the Finns are talking about “fully-fledged war” (the Finns don’t have a lot of luck: the had the EU presidency during the Lebanon war in 2006, and now [...]

Bemused by events in Georgia? Help is at hand - head over to Global Dashboard’s netvibe page where you’ll find a digest of news, blogs, tweets, images and video about Georgia.
It’s been fairly quickly put together - so there’s some extraneous stuff in there, but I’ll attempt to clean up over the next day or [...]

As Jules’s post on the sudden descent into a shooting war in Georgia implies, one of the West’s principal reasons for being interested in Georgia is that the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline flows through it, bringing oil from the Azeri-Chirag-Guneshli oil field in the Caspian to the Mediterranean coast in Turkey - handily avoiding Russian pipelines in [...]

Pretty amazing pictures from Georgia, where the Russian tanks are on the roll again, prompting dark memories of Afghanistan, Prague, Berlin…

This all for a separatist province with a population of….60,000. That’s about the same as Guildford.
I was wondering, if Russia invades South Ossetia, as it has, if that is technically an act of war [...]

Oh dear.  First the collapse of Doha, and now this:
Russia plans to form a state grain trading company to control up to half of the country’s cereal exports, intensifying fears that Moscow wants to use food exports as a diplomatic weapon in the same way as Gazprom has manipulated natural gas sales.
The move by Moscow, [...]

While we while away the summer musing on fantasy cabinets, someone has more daring fantasies up their sleeve.  A report in Izvestia that Russia wants to station nuclear-armed Tu-160 bombers on Cuba has created much excitement in the Washington Post (now this would boost McCain) and, er, the U.S. Air Force:
Gen. Norton Schwartz, whose nomination [...]

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