and also...

[ajva]

What the fuck is all this South Ossetia business? Why have I been totally blindsided by surprise at this situation? Is there anyone on my friends list who knows about the region and saw this coming? What the hell's going on?

Comments

[alextiefling.livejournal.com]

In my relatively uninformed opinion, there's not much to recommend either side. On the one hand, the people of South Ossetia asserted their independence fairly promptly after Georgia's own independence from the collapsing USSR, and have run themselves for nearly 20 years. Tanks on the doorstep is not a proper response to this kind of self-determination. On the other hand, there's some truth (I understand) in the idea that at least some Ossetian separatists are not so much freedom-fighters as Russian fifth-columnists, and Georgia might look askance at a large and pointy piece of its territory effectively becoming part of its already much, much larger neighbour.

(This is similar to Serbian worries about Kosovo vis-a-vis Albania; the difference is that the Albanian government is not coherent, powerful or talented enough to take ruthless military advantage of the situation and get away with it; whereas the situation in Chechenya shows that the Russians almost certainly are.)