Who has the bolshy yarbles? Female suicide bombers, that's who.

The head of Putin is heavy. As Dark Steer's analysis showed, the last thing Putin really wanted this August when he invaded Georgia / accepted Georgian provocation to invade was to add yet another Russian region to the long list of "restives."

Today we saw proof. Russia can't expand a sphere of influence while continuing to wage war just to maintain its territorial integrity. What succor can Putin offer the "oppressed peoples" of northern Georgia when he can't protect his own from Chechen suicide bombers?

So, questions for the Premier: Was Putin's motivation in the Georgian incursion to deny safe haven in South Ossetia for Chechen militants? If so, can't we expect him to back down on the announced Polish-border missiles?

Don't the Chechens want what Putin does, i.e. land and thus oil royalties? So isn't the real beef a federalist beef, i.e., between the regions en masse and the central government? Thus, isn't it absurd to target the capital of North Ossetia rather than a Big Russian target? What kind of dumbass Chechen would do this?

Do Ossetians (of N and S) really want Chechens to have beef with them rather than with Mother Russia? If not, does this push them towards Moscow and anschluss, or away and toward more "restiveness"? Might Moscow have a reason to start beef between regions therefore?

(This is not nearly as paranoid as it sounds. Putin covered up Beslan, assassinated Anna Politkovskaya, etc. He likes Dark Ops. Why he can't just say, "I'm waging war on Chechnya, don't mess with me, this is an insurrection," I still don't know. Presumably he still wants to be invited to the G8, but that's a high price for a tea party...)

hasta
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Hazards of guessing...

Russian tanks have cut Georgia in half. This is one of the hazards of guessing.

The "democracy agenda" forced Putin's hand. We're expanding NATO, sending anti-ballistic missile batteries to Poland and the Czech Republic, and we were training Georgian troops until this weekend. We assumed a Russian military response to be out of the question. We were wrong.

Fortunately for us, the war in Georgia has taught us rubes the lay of the land. Russia believes a sphere of influence is a sphere of influence. Listen to the prescient Ivan Krastev in 2005:

The “orange triumphalism” in the west that followed the regime changes in Georgia and Ukraine perceives the decline of Russia’s influence in the post-Soviet space as irreversible. The only relevant questions for the democratic triumphalists nowadays are how many more weeks Alexander Lukashenko can survive in power in Minsk and where the next “colour revolution” will take place.

In my view this single-scenario approach is an exercise in wishful non-thinking that underestimates the vulnerability of the newest “new democracies” and neglects Russia’s strategic drive to transform itself from a status-quo power into a revisionist power on the territory of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS).

While a return to Soviet size and authority is a scary strategic goal, Dark Steer thinks (right?) it unlikely. Putin has had to abduct tycoons, assassinate journalists, poison former spies, poison politicians of the "near abroad", and wage perennial war in his own backyard just to assert control. How many versions of Dagestan are there in Russia? Does Putin need more?

To be more specific, Abkhazia wants independence, not anschluss. Ossetia may feel stable under Russian absorption; a large troop presence there could just as easily invite attacks by Chechen separatists. It's a rough neighborhood, happily cut up by mountains, but rough.

Tentatively, since I was way wrong about the Israel-Syria love connection, I'm going to assume that Putin moves troops up to the outskirts of Tbilisi, scares shit out the populace, and pulls back. Russian "peacekeepers" sit on South Ossetia and Abkhazia, neither of which gains independence. Ukraine's Party of Regions takes parliament, Poland and the Czech shut down missile defense talks...

...Lithuania later...
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