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if it assures you, we are praying for you all

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another question to ask is: what do all of the other countries think about this? France??? Great Britain??? Australia???

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soon, and hopefully, there will be diplomacy.

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What triggered the latest crisis?

Tension has risen since the election of President Saakashvili in 2004. He offered South Ossetia dialogue and autonomy within a single Georgian state - but in 2006 South Ossetians voted in an unofficial referendum to press their demands for complete independence.

In April 2008 Nato said Georgia would be allowed to join the alliance at some point - angering Russia, which opposes the eastward expansion of Nato. Weeks later, Russia stepped up ties with the separatists in Abkhazia and South Ossetia.

In July Russia admitted its fighter jets entered Georgian airspace over South Ossetia to "cool hot heads in Tbilisi". Occasional clashes escalated, until six people were reportedly killed by Georgian shelling. Attempts to reach a ceasefire stuttered.

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ORIGINAL: bluestone

Reminds me of a certain civil war here in the USA a while back....

Russia has now cut Georgia in HALF. They are aggressors bent on restoring the Union. After Georgia, who will be next? Poland? Romania?

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ORIGINAL: Georgian_

THANK you very much for your support. Russians tanks are now near city Gori, there is an information that they are going to attack Tbilisi, capital. We are awaiting......and are nervous.....For tomorrow presidents of 5 countries are arriving in order to somehow force Russia stop aggression....
We are praying and waiting

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ORIGINAL: bluestone

of course all commies will support Russia.

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There is a great deal of blame to go around for the disastrous war over South Ossetia. Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili deserves the greatest share, for starting a war to reassert control over South Ossetia that Russia can now finish on its own terms. The Russian government, with former president and current Prime Minister Vladimir Putin in the lead, has cynically taken the conflict Saakashvili began as a golden opportunity to flex its muscles, make Georgia an object lesson for the rest of Russia's neighbors, rally Russian voters, and tighten its grip on Georgia's breakaway South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

But in a classic example of blowback, past American policy also bears some responsibility for the mess in Caucasus.

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But in a classic example of blowback, past American policy also bears some responsibility for the mess in Caucasus.

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ORIGINAL: Stephanos

I see you seem to ignore that Russia has funded and supported whole heartedly the dissidents in SO since the founding of Georgia.

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Typical how someone like you trash a freedom loving democracy for a increasingly despotic nation, lead by a former KGB Card carrying communist who has been in some form of political power in Russia since the "fall" of the Soviet Union. The USSR never fell, it merely went into hiding. And dare i say, it is starting to take its territory back.

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Saakashvili's tenure in Tblisi -- which began as a self-proclaimed reformist revolution -- has deteriorated into a regime marked by much of the same kind of corruption, cronyism and repression that it puported to overthrow. One of Saakashvili's partners in the revolution, Irakli Okruashvili, had a dramatic falling-out with the boss last year.

When he announced he was running for president against Saakashvili, he was arrested "and taken to Tbilisi’s notorious Isolator Number 7, the scene of well-documented torture of political prisoners since 1991," as Mark Almond of Oriel College, Oxford, noted in an article last year. After subjection to "strenuous interrogation techniques," Okruashvili "recanted" his charges against the president, and coughed up $6 million in shakedown "bail" money to win his release.

And what were Okruashvili's charges? Almond provides this quote from the former defense minister in Saakashvili’s government:

“The style of Saakashvili’s governance … has made dishonesty, injustice and oppression a way of life. Everyday repression, demolition of houses and churches, robbery, ‘kulakization’, and murders, I would stress, murders, have become common practice for the authorities.”