Word: russianizing
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...after 2003's bloodless Rose Revolution. He's an imposing man - at 6 ft. 4 in. (193 cm), he is the tallest Georgian I saw until we watched the national basketball team beat Belarus - with a polyglot charisma. At various times throughout the week, he spoke to me in Russian, Spanish and - above all - his famous English, an enthusiastic tumble of idiomatic American that he learned while studying and practicing law in New York City and Washington. (See pictures of the Russians in Ossetia...
...miles (6 km) long that would lead right up to the border with the breakaway republic of Abkhazia. The area may have natural potential - "The water's like boiled milk," an official told me approvingly - but Saakashvili seemed to be ignoring the obvious. If war breaks out again, the Russian army will rumble first through Anaklia, bombing and burning, just as it did last year...
...chants of "Gaumarjos!" (To victory!). Saakashvili's personal film crew, which follows him nearly everywhere he goes, climbed the berm looking for a better shot but was quickly pulled down. This is, after all, a tense place, where a shouting match two years ago between Saakashvili and a Russian general almost led to a wider conflict...
...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 lecture [Putin] ever gave me in Moscow was 'All these Eastern European leaders seem to be so subservient to the U.S.' It was very disgusting to Putin. He warned me, 'Don't even...
...TIME's special report on the Georgia-Russian crisis...