(Untitled)

[jascha]

cathing up on some recent posts, and i saw Pfloid's about the Russian invasion of Georgia. I actually have a good friend in Georgia right now, and he's been keeping a blog, which makes for pretty interesting reading for the curious:

http://johningeorgia.blogspot.com/

Comments

[mynatt]

That was interesting, thanks. It pretty much confirmed the impression I had of the fighting. It seems like the real question now is how much of Georgia's infrastructure Russia will blow up before deciding they've had enough for this round, and retreating to the breakaway regions which started this whole thing.

Strangely, I feel some connection to this particular war simply by virtue of having sung some music from the region. Not that I wouldn't have cared otherwise, but for example I knew where South Ossetia was before this started, and knew that it was an unsettled question likely to result in conflict yet again. Maybe tours of Georgian choirs in Moscow are needed now.

[pfloide]

The whole Caucasus is full of unsettled questions that, assuming no overall progress in how we deal with stuff-in-general, will fuel all kinds of conflicts for another century or two. That region is more Balkanized than the Balkans. Viz: map For instance: Nakhichevan, Ngorno-Karabagh, Daghestan, Chechnya, Abkhazia, Ossetia, to name some of the most topical. Not to mention long-standing disputes about the adjacent areas like Kurdistan, the Azeri regions of Iran, and in the long run, if conflicts start breaking out and the status quo becomes untenable, the position of historic Armenia is bound to come back up again.

Ugh.