FrVladimir - You are a ready Russian zombie.
"In Russia there is a small small town which name like a part of Georgia. Tsars Imeretinskie with many Georgians here ran, being rescueed from from Persians in 17 century." - Do you even understand what you wrote? There never where such people like - "Tsars Imeretinskie" in Georgia... It is just pathethic.
"During Soviet time many republics complacently lived, using privileges and a prosperity, owing to Russia." - Well why the HELL DID YOU INVADE all those countries? MANY OF THEM NEVER WANTED TO BE PART OF THE OLD SHITTY USSR. LEARN ---> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Army_invasion_of_Georgia
"We are always ready to come to the aid, but nobody would be desirable superfluous problems." - You mean you are always ready to invade your neibours? http://www.ireport.com/docs/DOC-152958
" As if to the Georgian, living nowadays in Russia they tell in what poverty is nowadays Georgia therefore are ready to remain on earnings only in Russia, accepting thus the Russian citizenship." - meh, come on. Have you been to Georgia? And if you really heared such a thing from a Georgian, you know why he told you that? This is the only way you Russians can *** off, because your brains are already ready for this opinion. "Oh yess, everythingz bad in Georgia and Ukraine... " - There are problem,s... and there would have been far less of them if you did not invade Georgia every few years (1921;1993;1994;2008)
Nobody wishes to be involved in the next war... - It does not matter? What matters is do those criminals in Kremlin want that or not.
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Appeasing Russia
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Just as their forebears in the 1930s sought refuge in the League of Nations, the United States and Europe duly take the Georgian crisis to the United Nations. But the U.N. is, by definition, as impotent now as the League of Nations was then. Russia can, and clearly will, veto any resolution of significance. And what power, other than words, could the United Nations deploy anyway? Sanctions? Against Russia, which supplies Europe with most of its energy, just as winter approaches?
Whether Russia intends to fully invade Georgia is unclear. It's plausible that Moscow has not made up its mind, and is waiting to gauge the West's response. Two things are clear. Russia's bombing campaign against Georgia is now targeting more than military targets. At the least, Russia seems determined to set back Georgia's economy for years. It also seems clear—from what Vitaly Churkin, Russia's able ambassador at the U.N., said Sunday—that Russia is demanding, presumably as part of the price of a ceasefire, the ousting of Georgia's pro-Western leader, Mikheil Saakashvili. He would be wise to remember what happened to a pro-Western leader in nearby Ukraine; Viktor Yushchenko was poisoned and nearly died.
So what can the West do? The Europeans are unlikely to do anything beyond hand-wringing. The first responses in the comment columns of Britain's leftish newspaper The Guardian show its readers closing ranks around the comforting but irrelevant thought that this is all somehow George W. Bush's fault. Besides, with post-cold-war defense budgets now barely visible to the naked eye, the Europeans lack the capacity to intervene. They don't have even the transport aircraft.
The United States, on the other hand, does have the capability to actually do something. Not to expel Russian forces from South Ossetia—that ethnic tangle is best left to negotiation—but to guarantee Georgia's sovereignty and independence. Georgia's right to self-defense is unquestionable: it needs no U.N. resolution to say that. Washington has every right to send "peace-keeping" troops into Georgia if Saakashvili requests it. The 82nd Airborne, its brigades newly returned from Iraq, could be mustered as a guarantor force. Numbers are not critical. What matters is the message: the Soviet-style attack on Georgia will not to be dismissed Chamberlain-style. President Bush racheted up the rhetoric Monday afternoon, when he blasted Russia for invading "a sovereign neighboring state … Such an action is unacceptable in the 21st century … The Russian government must respect Georgia's territorial integrity and sovereignty."
And if the West does not react forcefully to protect Georgia? Russia, and all the nations on its periphery, will draw the obvious lessons. Will Putin follow history and demand next a Russian right to move troops into Estonia, a NATO member, to "protect" its Russian population?
There are few lessons safely drawn from history—except that of George Santayana: "Those who do not learn from the past are doomed to repeat it."
© 2008
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