It’s strange, really; looking back at Radovan Karadzic’s career, the thing that strikes me is how he seems to have recapped most of Europe’s 20th century in his own life, barking his shins on the bits that didn’t fit.
First of all, he wanted to be a romantic poet, itself a dated idea. According to Tim [...]

What Henry said.
Just one key part of the argument:

Russia sees the spread of democratization as a threat to its control of the ‘Near Abroad.’ It has been pushing quite deliberately for a redefinition of the norms of territorial integrity and intervention that would legitimate its continued presence in Georgia and elsewhere, and allow it to [...]

I hadn’t paid much attention to this Reuters report from yesterday: it says that mobile rocket launchers are being ‘given priority’ in the queue of armor moving from Russia into South Ossetia / Georgia. These are Soviet-era weapons which are said to have a range of 35 km. There may be a propaganda angle to [...]

Not all of the reports are consistent, but they are increasingly consistent: Russian forces have reportedly taken the central Georgian city of Gori, essentially splitting the country in two and occupying the main east-west highway. Russian forces are reported to be in Zugdidi, a larger Georgian town near to Abkhazia. Russian forces have reportedly taken [...]

What Ron and Dick said.
(Update: Link fixed thanks to an observant commenter.)

It was inevitable: exit stage left the images of death and destruction from Georgia on American television (especially the ones seen frequently on Russia Today), and enter the war’s implications for the Presidential election.  Specifically, this detailed statement from John McCain (with a brief preview from The Politico), showing his sense at vindication at his [...]

I’m writing this in advance, so things may change during the night, but my better half’s foundation made evacuation mandatory Saturday afternoon, so off we go. We’re on our way to Yerevan to see if things subside reasonably quickly. I hope so, as I really like Tbilisi and was enjoying settling in there. One way [...]

So Tbilisi was very normal as I drove around this morning. Did I notice more uniforms than usual? Maybe, but maybe that’s just me looking for them more. The tank being hauled on the back of a truck in from the outskirts of town was definitely out of the ordinary. The short convoys of black [...]

This one is breaking fast — as I was writing an earlier version of this post, Georgia’s president Mikhail Saakashvili said at a press conference that Georgian forces had downed two Russian planes that had breached Georgian air space. Local media are reporting that Georgia has taken most of Tskhinvali, the breakaway region’s capital. The [...]

So when the 10 new EU members joined in 2004, the old EU-15 came up with a clunky compromise about the free movement of labor: each old member could decide for itself, but they’d have to publicly review that decision after two years (2006) and then again in three more years (2009) and then after [...]