Word: georgias
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...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...
...question isn't Saakashvili's charm; it's the quality of his vision for Georgia and whether his wary allies can trust him to lead his country there. The stakes are high. This tiny country half the size of North Carolina is the rawest point of contact between the rising confidence of Russia and the eastward encroachment of the great Western alliances - NATO and the E.U. Yet the most crucial conflict may be the one within Saakashvili himself, between his enormous ambitions for Georgia and the impetuousness that could yet spoil his young democracy or bring more bloodshed...
...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...
...TIME's special report on the Georgia-Russian crisis...
...years of escalating border incidents, war began in earnest the night of Aug. 7, 2008, when Saakashvili, who says he believed a Russian attack was imminent, ordered the shelling of Tskhinvali, the capital of South Ossetia. It was a colossal miscalculation. Saakashvili told me he never expected the U.S., Georgia's closest ally, to fight for Georgia. Yet the country was nonetheless gripped by a sense of abandonment when the inevitable punishing Russian counterattack came. The Russians bombed infrastructure targets all over Georgia and cut off the main east-west highway, then marched to within 34 miles...