Word: russia
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...thaw and hints that the two countries, prodded by Washington, would reopen a dialogue that has been stalled since the Mumbai terror attacks last year. On June 16, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari shook hands at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit in Russia, where Zardari acknowledged that Pakistan's greatest threat was the Taliban - a remarkable admission for a country that has long considered India its most dangerous neighbor. Indian authorities, meanwhile, may soon start talks with the Hurriyat separatists. But every gesture of reconciliation - most recently, meetings between top diplomats on the sidelines...
...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...
...Show began a short while after the one-year anniversary of Georgia's ill-fated war with Russia. A report by the European Union blaming both Russia and Georgia for the conflict was about to be released, but word had already leaked that the report would accuse Georgia of firing the first shots. The war all but ended Saakashvili's dreams of unifying Georgia with the breakaway republics of South Ossetia and Abkhazia - nearly a fifth of its territory - and the report could possibly damage his other great project: convincing the West that Georgia is a reliable military and economic...
...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 to the Caucasus...
...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...