Word: nato
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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When Russia sent shells raining down on Georgia, it seemed initially as if Vladimir Putin was savagely pursuing what he saw as Russian national interests. Moscow claimed Georgian aggression against Russian loyalists in South Ossetia and has objected to both Georgia's bid to join NATO and the Pentagon's arming and training of the Georgian military. But a closer examination of the run-up to Putin's inexcusable invasion suggests that Russia's action had as much to do with its wounded pride as with its alleged impaired security...
...Russia's litany of indignities dates to the early 1990s when the Soviet empire collapsed. A bipolar universe gave way to a world in which the "sole superpower" boasted about how it had "won" the Cold War. Russia was forced to swallow the news that NATO would grant membership to former client states in Eastern Europe, along with former Soviet republics. Russia, the fallen empire, would have to content itself with membership in the largely symbolic Partnership for Peace...
...raised the rhetorical temperature several degrees in his statement. "Russia's ongoing action raised serious questions about its intentions in Georgia and the region," Bush said in a Rose Garden announcement Wednesday. In a veiled threat of isolating Russia from the World Trade Organization, the G-8 and the NATO consultative relationship it has held for more than a decade, Bush said Russia was "putting its aspirations [of international integration] at risk...
...southern tier, how the successor to the KGB stayed more plugged into intelligence from the area than the CIA ever hoped to, and how local leaders flew to Moscow to clear all important decisions. This was the context for Washington's push to get Georgia to join NATO...
...Rubicon, demonstrating that the Caucasus sit squarely and solely in Russia's sphere of influence. Moscow's long-term objectives in Georgia no doubt are to install a friendly government in Tbilisi (it has tried more than once to do that since Georgian independence), keep Georgia out of NATO, stop the flow of arms into Chechnya and take control of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline, the only important export route from the Caspian that does not pass through Russia. For it is oil that will give Russia all the more leverage over the southern tier...