Word: abkhazia
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...defend ourselves and our relatives. So this idea, this word terrorist, when it is applied to people fighting in the Caucasus, is an artificial word that was made up to discredit the resistance," she said. After describing how she took up arms in 1993 against Russian-backed forces in Abkhazia, a disputed region of Georgia, she added, "We lose our men and we choose to fight back. Does that make us terrorists...
...home and sell it on to Europe at a huge profit. But in the past three years, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko has started to assert his independence in subtle ways. Following the 2008 Russia-Georgia war, Lukashenko declined to recognize the breakaway Georgian republics of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, despite pressure from Russia to do so. Lukashenko also joined the E.U.'s Eastern Partnership initiative, created in 2008 to strengthen ties between Europe and the ex-Soviet bloc, much to Moscow's dismay. And last June, Belarus refused to attend a key security summit in Moscow after Russia slapped...
...hand in non-NATO member countries, where the alliance is less willing to intervene directly. It has been suggested that last year’s war between Russia and Georgia, which resulted in Russia’s recognition of the independence of the breakaway regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, was a retaliation against U.S. support of Ukraine and Georgia’s NATO membership bids. And Russian President Dmitri Medvedev apparently has no qualms about stating his displeasure about Ukraine’s overtures toward Western Europe...
...lasted five days, but the danger continues. Russia, which has recognized South Ossetia and Abkhazia as independent states (only Nicaragua and Venezuela have followed suit), has evicted all international monitors from the territories and is most likely arming those areas to the teeth. Georgia's new Defense Minister, Bacho Akhalaia, told me the Georgian army will "stay calm." But the military is rebuilding. An infantry battalion will deploy to Afghanistan in January under the command of U.S. Marines, and it will return, as veterans did from a deployment in Iraq, with more experience and confidence for the next engagement. Though...
...Saakashvili's earliest political promises in 2004 was to get Abkhazia and South Ossetia back in Georgia's fold. Both territories had turned to Russia for protection after a bloody civil war in the early 1990s, however, and the Kremlin had little incentive to broker a peace. Instead, it began to use unrest there to undermine Saakashvili's courtship of NATO, which he wanted Georgia to join. Saakashvili told me that from the outset, any talk he had with then Russian President Vladimir Putin on the breakaway territories was met with warnings about his relationship to the West: "The first...