Long before this year’s Georgian war, I chatted to a European foreign policy expert recently returned from the Caucasian flash-point.  He was shocked to discover that UN peacekeepers there did not patrol at night (similar limitations beset the UN in Congo, a problem during the ongoing crisis there).  Now that the EU has its own monitors in-country, are they any better after dark?  Maybe not…

EU cease-fire monitors in Georgia claimed a small victory when Russian forces pulled back from a disputed village near breakaway South Ossetia, but witnesses have said they returned with nightfall.

Georgia has condemned the Russian presence in Perevi as a violation of the cease-fire brokered after their five-day war in August, when Russia intervened in its ex-Soviet neighbor to halt a Georgian military assault on pro-Russian South Ossetia.

News of the troops’ departure eased fears of confrontation in the area, where some of the 1,100 villagers had packed up and left. European Union monitors said the pullback came at their insistence and followed discussions with the Russian Foreign Ministry and military.

But by nightfall, a regional police source said around 20 Russian soldiers with a single armored vehicle had returned to a checkpoint in Perevi. A police spokesman confirmed the account. An EU spokeswoman said a patrol would check the village in the morning.

This may have escaped people’s attention (it did mine), but Ukraine and Georgia were told they couldn’t join the NATO club this week, and Georgia was given a bit of a ticking off for its abrupt and dumb escalation of the North Ossetia conflict in August.

The NATO communique said: “we remind all parties that peaceful conflict resolution is a key principle of the Partnership for Peace Framework Document.”

As Liz Fuller writes for Radio Free Europe:

“Translated from diplomat-speak into plain English, that reads “The use of heavy artillery against civilians asleep in their homes in Tskhinvali just hours after Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili announced a unilateral cease-fire was a crude violation of our basic ground rules, and one we cannot overlook.”

Fuller adds:

“Equally, if not more damaging to Georgia’s NATO aspirations was the spectacular ineptitude of its armed forces, which proved anything but battle-ready. The country’s two crack U.S.-trained brigades were serving as part of the international peacekeeping force in Iraq during the August war. According to a new International Crisis Group report, “the [Georgian] armed forces and military infrastructure sustained heavy damage during the Russian invasion, revealing flaws in planning, supply, coordination, air defense, and combat communications systems which contributed to quick demoralization of the troops,” who abandoned the strategic military base in Senaki without firing a single shot.

Number two in our occasional series of tributes to the iconic style of M. Sarkozy:

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 the process.

Interestingly, the conflict in the Caucausus has kicked off at the same time as an explosion on the Turkish section of the pipeline has closed it down for the next 21 days.  Kurdish rebels have claimed responsibility for the attack, but the cause of the explosion can’t be ascertained for sure until the fire (which is currently still burning) has been put out.

Ordinarily, say BP, one of the alternatives would be to shift oil from Azerbaijan via rail links through Georgia.  Unfortunate, then, that according to energy analysts the conflict in South Ossetia makes that option look rather less attractive. 

Suspension of the pipeline’s operation won’t have a massive effect on world markets, as it supplies a small proportion of total world supply.  But its political importance – as a statement of intent towards diversified supplies and pipeline routes to the west – is much greater.  With Kurdish rebels reportedly threatening more attacks, it’ll be interesting to see how things pan out from here…

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 – it’s a separatist province, after all, that denies it is part of Georgian territory, so it’s debatable whether this is an infringement of Georgian territory. But then Putin helpfully clarified matters. ‘War has started’, he said. Good, glad we got that cleared up.

The president of Georgia, Mikhail Saakashvili, has been on CNN begging for American assistance. “It’s not about Georgia anymore. It’s about America, its values,” he said. John McCain would no doubt agree, but I’m not sure the American people are that keen to leap to Georgia’s defence, though no doubt the headline ‘Russia invades Georgia’ will alarm some of the hicks down south… ‘Git mah gun, John Boy, the Russkies will be headin’ for Alabama next!’.

Meanwhile George Bush is busy watching the Olympics in Beijing, and is only likely to get really agitated if the Russian tanks roll down the main motorway in Tblisi, which is named after him. Russian tanks on George Bush highway, that would be something.

It’s notable that Saakashvili didn’t even mention the EU. This is, after all, the first war on European soil since the Yugoslav War of the 1990s. A decade on, and the EU is still nowhere near being able to police its own backyard.