Putin shoots, he scores!

Or, to put it in sitcom terms, Saakashvili thought he was going on a three-hour tour of the Oahu coast, but wound up shipwrecked on a desert island.

However, he did authorize heavy rocket bombardment of South Ossetia and conveniently left tunnel open, so Ossetian can flee to Russia.

Even during Croatian ethic cleansing of Serbs, they left Serbs in major Croatian cities (mostly) at peace. Point of ethic cleansing is to reduce minority to manageable level (from 12% to 2-3% in case of Serbs in Croatia).

Well, there are tens of thousands of Ossetians living within Georgia proper, and Saakashvili (who is certainly no democrat) has never engaged in anti-Ossetian propaganda as such.

Actually, it seems that objective was to pound heavy artillery over Tskhinvali and leave tunnel intentionally open so Ossetians can flee to Russia. Plain ethic cleansing.

Off course, West will never accept that their ‘democratic’ president of Georgia was planing ethnic cleansing.

A Georgian National Security Council official said the document signed by Saakashvili called for an unconditional cease-fire, a non-use of force agreement, a withdrawal of Russian troops from Georgian territory, including the South Ossetia region, and provisions for international peacekeeping and mediation.

I don’t think the Russians are being all that unreasonable in rejecting an unconditional ceasefire that has conditions which amount to them giving up.

No conspiracy needed as to why Russia had forces — and their best forces, armed with T-90 tanks — in the area. This area has been a tinderbox for years. One thing is clear, however, that they had an operational plan for going into South Ossetia and executed it. But then, the United States has an operational plan for invading Canada, so that means nothing. Militaries make operational plans all the time and file them away in case they’re ever needed, but the fact that the U.S. has a plan for invading Canada does not mean that the U.S. actually is expecting to invade Canada. It apparently took 11 hours between the Georgian invasion of South Ossetia and the Russians getting underway from Vladikavkaz (it takes about an hour for armor forces to get from Vladikavkaz to South Ossetia and everybody seems to agree that Russian forces got there 12 hours after fighting started). That is hardly “Russian forces ready and waiting to enter South Ossetia” territory. That is exactly what you would expect if the Russians were taken unawares and had to organize a response from a base an hour away from South Ossetia.

“The Russians have gone to great lengths to try and implicate the Ukraine in the Russian Air Force losses, even going as far as to suggest that an SA-5 sold to the Georgians by the Ukraine was responsible for the Backfire loss,” a second U.S. analyst says. “That’s clearly not the case, but shows the Russian attempt to bring the Ukraine into the periphery of this event by implication…

If true, that’s a lot of pressure that’s going to be brought to bare on Ukraine, if not more than mere pressure.