<< Georgia part one Putin's whole endeavor is to install Moscow-friendly regimes in Eastern Europe and the Caucasus, in a paranoid rendition of the US campaign against Serbia. In this version, Russia comes to the rescue of aggrieved Russophile minorities, wages a bombing campaign, and calls actions by the small central government ethnic cleansing. Medvedev's aforementioned background provides the final stroke in the US : Serbia :: Russia : Georgia analogy; the lawyer wants Saakashvili in the Hague.
I can see the Ukraine falling, Saakashvili out of a job, etc., but it seems more likely that Poland and the Baltics will not shit themselves with fear. For one, Putin sounds unhinged, comparing Saakashvili to Saddam Hussein:
"Of course Saddam Hussein had to be hung for destroying some Shia villages. And the current Georgian rulers, who wiped ten Ossetian villages off the face of the Earth in an hour, of course they have to be protected."Ilves of Estonia said "I am a Georgian"...Lech Kaczynski didn't trust Putin's cease-fire yesterday; today that looks pretty wise, as latest reports have Russians moving out of Gori, deeper into Georgia...
Little Lithuania, whose name was tossed around as an alternate missile defense site, and thus has been put on Putin's shitlist unnecessarily, may prove hard core. A few years ago, Russia cut oil to the Meziekiu Nafta refinery, and then set it on fire.
Lithuanian president Valdas Adamkus, unmoved, hinted that the train to Kaliningrad would be shut down for "political repairs":
"We should guarantee the safety of trains and passengers," he said, according to the Baltic News Service. "Should repairs be needed in order to increase the safety of railway services, I see no reason to heat up political tensions."
Calmer than you are. Shit to this effect has been going on every other year for what seems like all decade. The Baltics respond to economic pressure in kind; they don't escalate. They don't mass troops on the borders of some nether region, incapable of being taunted into a "Who's got the bolshy yarbles?" contest. DS presumes the Iron Sphere will not expand...
Trying to stay calm...
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ds
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