With its invasion of Georgia, Russia has announced to the world
that its superpower status is back. The Kremlin is once more
flexing its military muscles -- the same way it did between 1945
and 1991, and the results are turning out to be just as bloody.
There are already hundreds of dead and thousands of wounded and
refugees. The tiny region of South Ossetia, located in the
Caucuses mountains of southern Russia, is at the center of these
tensions. It is a complicated conflict within conflicts.
Georgia, which broke away from the Soviet Union after its
collapse in 1991, tried to reclaim ownership of South Ossetia,
which had separated from its territory about the same time. In
another brutal war that ended in 1993, rebellious South Ossetia,
which has about 70,000 people (about a fifth are ethnic
Georgians) and is about one and a half times the size of the
tiny principality of Luxembourg, had successfully defended
itself against Georgia’s first attempt to reincorporate it. And
this time things appear no different