Word: russianizing
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...government" of South Ossetia, a small region with a population of about 70,000 people. That rash action was perhaps unwise, but it is evident from Russia's military response that Moscow was waiting for such an act to provide a pretext for the use of force. Large Russian contingents quickly swept into South Ossetia and then into Georgia, sending tanks to Gori and bombing Gori and the capital, Tbilisi...
...Ukraine could well be the next flash point. The Russian leadership has already openly questioned whether it needs to respect Ukraine's territorial integrity. Russian leaders have also remarked that Crimea, a part of Ukraine, should once again be joined to Russia. Similarly, Russian pressure on Moldova led to the effective partition of that small former Soviet republic. Moscow is also continuing to try to economically isolate central Asian neighbors like Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. And the Baltic nations of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia have been the object of various threats from Russia, including economic sanctions and disruptive cyberwarfare...
...Kremlin, that would oversee much of the former Soviet territories. This attitude reflects in part the intense nationalistic mood that now permeates Russia's political élite. Vladimir Putin, former President and now Prime Minister, is riding this nationalist wave, exploiting it politically and propagating it with the Russian public. Some now even talk of a renewed Russian military presence in Cuba as a form of retaliation against the U.S. for its support of the independence of the post-Soviet states...
...West, especially the U.S., the conflict between Russia and Georgia poses both moral and geostrategic challenges. The moral dimension is self-evident: a small country that gained its independence only recently, after almost two centuries of Russian domination, deserves international support that goes beyond simple declarations of sympathy. Then there are questions of geostrategy. An independent Georgia is critical to the international flow of oil. A pipeline for crude oil now runs from Baku in Azerbaijan, on the Caspian Sea, through Georgia to the Turkish Mediterranean coast. The link provides the West access to the energy resources of central Asia...
...some point, the West should consider the Olympic option. If the issue of Georgia's territorial integrity is not adequately resolved (by, for example, the deployment in South Ossetia and Abkhazia of a truly independent international security force replacing Russian troops), the U.S. should contemplate withdrawing from the 2014 Winter Games, to be held in the Russian city of Sochi, next to the violated Georgia's frontier. There is a precedent for this. I was part of the Carter Administration when we brandished the Olympic torch as a symbolic weapon in 1980, pulling out of the Summer Games in Moscow...