[BRIEF NOTE] On the South Ossetia mess

[rfmcdonald]

From Reuters:

Russian forces battled pro-Western Georgian troops in South Ossetia on Friday in an escalating conflict that threatens to engulf a key energy transit route to Western Europe.

Both sides ignored pleas from world leaders for calm as Moscow and Tbilisi blamed each other for the fighting in South Ossetia which began after several days of skirmishes. Georgian forces shelled the capital of its breakaway region, which separatists said left 1,400 people dead.

Moscow said its troops were responding to a Georgian assault to retake the region, which broke from Georgia as the Soviet Union was collapsing but has no international recognition.

The crisis, the first to confront Kremlin leader Dmitry Medvedev since he took office in May, with violence flaring in a region seen as a key energy transit route where Russia and the West are vying for influence. The hostilities dampened investor confidence and hit the Moscow stock exchange.

Georgia said Russia bombed airfields and Poti port deep inside its territory and Tbilisi and rushed tanks and troops into South Ossetia, formally still a part of Georgia, to reinforce its small force of peacekeepers.

"If the whole world does not stop Russia today, then Russian tanks will be able to reach any other European capital," President Mikheil Saakashvili said.

A top Georgian official said Saakashvili was planning to declare martial law within hours, a move that will gives him a free hand to manage the conflict.

The U.N. Security Council held a second meeting on the conflict on Friday, and diplomats said they hoped the council would unanimously call for a ceasefire.

I'd start by recommending, for your bloggish edication, Maria Farrell's post South Ossetia at Crooked Timber, Doug Merrill's When Conflicts Thaw: South Ossetia" and Douglas Muir's South Ossetia: alea jacta est both at A Fistful of Euros, and Joshua Foust's "The Caucasus Drops" at his Registan blog. As for a general overview of the situation, Wikipedia's page on South Ossetia and the page on the ongoing war provide what is likely as good and up to date information as is available anyway.

My thoughts on the situation?

• I'll follow Douglas Muir's take on this war having been caused by Saakashvili acting on impulse and making a stupid gamble on Russian military incompetence that seems to have failed, badly. Edward Lucas (in The TImes of London) stumbles, badly, in this regard--starting a war with a ground offensive in a time of military tension doesn't seem to me the action of an exceptionally competent or support-worth government.


• I'll follow Farrell in agreeing that this war marks the consolidation of Russia's position in Georgia and with Faust on noting the interconnections of the Georgian conflict with the wider hydrocarbon petrochemicals game in the Caucasus, although I'm on the record at Crooked Timber as disagreeing that this necessarily means a new round of territorial expansions. (South Ossetia--and perhaps soon Abkhazia--are highly contingent situations that just don't exist in Ukraine or the Baltic States or ...)


• As always, my sympathies are for the victims of this conflict, of whatever ethnicity or nationality, who are going to suffer because of the desires of various governments and movements to make them suffer for those groups' own benefits. I'll be thinking good thoughts for the one person who I know inside Georgia right now, and the several people whose blogs I read who have connections in Georgia, tonight and later.