The other story of note over the weekend was the announcement by the Georgian Foreign Ministry that the U.S. and Georgia would be signing a Strategic Partnership Agreement on Jan. 4. The declaration sent the State Dept. scrambling to issue its own statement, and illustrates yet again the way in which, regardless of the merits of a U.S.-Georgia strategic partnership, a U.S.-Saakashvili partnership leaves us exposed to the whims of a man who has demonstrated his willingness to force our hand in very problematic ways. That said, the agreement itself, if it is in fact modeled on the recently inked [...]
With all the “he says, she says” over just how the Russia-Georgia War started, it seemed only a matter of time before a charge of American involvement was raised. For my part, I’d found it either particularly reckless or particularly suspicious that Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili would start a war with Russia immediately following joint military exercises with American forces, and while some of the latter were still present in the country on Georgian military bases. Something tells me that the more we learn about the conflict, the more we’ll come to appreciate the voices of reason in its aftermath. [...]
On Oct. 30, Murat Zyazikov resigned as president of Ingushetia — a small, mainly-Muslim republic in Russia’s North Caucasus region. Zyazikov’s fate was likely sealed two weeks previously, on Oct. 18, when a military convoy was ambushed by insurgents between the villages of Alkhasty and Surkhakhi, leaving approximately 50 servicemen dead. The ambush was the largest of its type yet seen in the republic. Ingushetia lies directly to the west of Chechnya (the Ingush and the Chechens are close ethnic relatives), and the leaders of the insurgency in Ingushetia have drawn inspiration from their Chechnyan counterparts, who have been fighting [...]
