Russia is asking for trouble in Georgia

Mighty Russia, population 150m, and tiny Georgia, population 4.6m, its former colony and now fiercely independent neighbour, are in terrible danger of blundering into a bloody and pointless conflict in the Caucasus. It would sorely damage relations between Moscow, the European Union and the US. It could also destabilise the rest of the Caucasus region. Washington and Brussels can urge restraint, but the only country that can stop the nonsense is Russia itself. The immediate cause of the conflict is a tug-of-war over the secessionist region of South Ossetia, which has been trying to break away from Georgia since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. It is an ethnic patchwork of mountain villages, part-Ossetian and part-Georgian, with just 70,000 inhabitants, divided between pro-Russian and pro-Georgian administrations, and... [read full story]