Word: ossetians
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...When Saakashvili unleashed a massive artillery-and-rocket barrage on the South Ossetian capital of Tskhinvali last Thursday night, the Russian response was all too predictable: having jealously guarded the territory's autonomy from Georgia as a point of leverage against Tbilisi's desire to join NATO, Moscow launched an offensive of its own, fighting Georgian forces inside South Ossetia and bombing cities inside Georgia proper. Meanwhile, separatist forces in Abkhazia, another Moscow-backed separatist Georgian province, opened a second front against Georgian forces, while Russia's Back Sea Fleet sailed from its base in Ukraine to impose a naval...
...strategy to preserve its traditional spheres of influence following the collapse of the Soviet empire. The two territories broke away from Georgia for the same ethnic-nationalist reasons that Chechnya wanted out of Russia. But while Moscow relentlessly and bloodily suppressed Chechnya's secessionists, it fully supported their Ossetian and Abkhazian counterparts as a tool against Georgia's tilt toward the West. Moscow issued Russian citizenship to over 90% of the population of both entities and deployed "peacekeeping" forces sympathetic to the separatists to police the de facto lines of secession. So when Saakashvili turned his artillery on Tskhinvali, killing...
...post-Soviet countries to recognize their independence. Russia has pointedly abandoned the economic sanctions, clamped on Abkhazia in 1996 to punish its separatism. The Parliament of the Russian Republic of Alania-North Ossetia already voted to incorporate South Ossetia. Next week, the Russian Duma will consider Abkhazian and South Ossetian appeals to join Russia...
...that broke away from Moldova back in the 1990s. Russia deploys its peace-keepers in all the three separatist provinces, and these serve to counter any thoughts of forcible re-integration by Georgia or Moldova. Moscow has also granted Russian citizenship to some 90% of the Abkhazian and South Ossetian populations, giving it grounds to intervene whenever Russia deems it expedient, on the basis of ensuring the security of its citizens...
...piece of engineering, the BTC pipeline is a brilliant geopolitical bank shot. Built over three years, the pipeline had to skirt war zones in the Armenian-occupied Nagorno-Karabakh region in Azerbaijan, and in Georgia, which has been in a conflict with South Ossetian separatists. Then there were the engineering issues: the pipeline had to pass under about 1,500 rivers. At one point BP hired 400 archaeologists to sift through the mountain of ancient artifacts unearthed along the way. Equally daunting was the political wrangling: two of the three countries changed Presidents during construction, requiring lengthy renegotiations over...