Judging by how Elena explained it, she's making it sound as if Georgia is the aggressor against Russia and that they declared war against Russia from the get go.

For all this has happened before.

That is the worst thing about the tragic war over South Ossetia. The impetuous Georgian resort to force, the appeal to Russian armed strength giving Russia a chance to weaken Georgia's independence, the terrible crimes carried out by civilians of the winning side against the helpless families of the losing side, the ethnic cleansing, the refugees - all these horrors happened here only 15 years ago.

The trouble in Abkhazia began when the Soviet Union broke up in 1991. Georgia moved to full independence, asserting that Abkhazia was part of its territory. The Abkhazians retorted that association with Georgia within the Soviet framework had been one thing; downgrading to an ethnic minority directly and exclusively ruled from Tbilisi was quite another. Agitation began.

Then in August 1992, the Georgian President Eduard Shevardnadze suddenly flung the army against Abkhazia. Like Saakashvili, he tried to reassert control by bombarding and seizing the capital, Sokhumi. Violent fighting broke out. In the war that followed, Russian weaponry and air strikes helped little Abkhazia - with less than a tenth of Georgia's population - to an unexpected victory.

When it was over, Abkhazia's towns and villages lay in ruins. And atrocities had followed the fighting troops. At first, it was the Georgian militias who did their worst against non-Georgian civilians. But then, as the war turned their way, Abkhazian paramilitaries and the wild north Caucasus volunteers who had swarmed in to help them took indiscriminate vengeance. Almost the entire Georgian and Mingrelian population, some 150,000, fled with the Georgian army. Many of them live in bleak refugee settlements to this day.

The point of this history is that nobody learnt anything from it, nobody except the Russians. So history has repeated itself. In the years that followed, Georgian politicians failed to see that only imaginative diplomacy, not bombardment by rockets, might bring about some kind of rapprochement with South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

The Abkhazians, independent but recognised by nobody, have no choice but to accept unofficial Russian hegemony. But at heart they resent it. They dream of escaping into the big world and genuine independence. Saakashvili, when he came to power, could have exploited that resentment by making a fresh start with Abkhazia. A few gestures and proposals were made. But the Abkhazian leaders, grimly suspicious, rejected them all as eyewash. Saakashvili, they insisted, was a nationalist demagogue who intended to recapture both Abkhazia and smaller South Ossetia by force. Today they are entitled to say: 'We told you so.'

It's time the West stopped talking about 'Georgian territorial integrity', and about South Ossetia and Abkhazia as 'breakaway regions of Georgia', as if their 'illegal secession' can somehow be reversed. It cannot. That useless dream is dead. The question now is quite different. It is how their independence can be recognised and made real. Only in that way can the outside world make it harder for Russia to use them as pawns in the game of crippling Georgian freedom.

The New York Times

WASHINGTON — Even as Russia pledged to begin withdrawing its forces from neighboring Georgia today, U.S. officials said the Russian military had been moving launchers for short-range ballistic missiles into South Ossetia, a step that appeared intended to tighten its hold on the breakaway territory.

The Russians deployed several SS-21 missile launchers and supply vehicles Friday, according to U.S. officials familiar with intelligence reports. From those positions north of Tskhinvali, the South Ossetian capital, the missiles can reach much of Georgia, including Tbilisi, the capital.

lizbeth:
The US has apparently known about the tension between Russia and Georgia for some time, but has chosen to ignore it. Because of our involvement in the Mid-East?

You said that it is occupation. I asked about you definition of occupation. No answer.

I directly asked you whether any government has right to eliminate their own civilians. No answer.

After that very moment when Georgia declared war to Russia, Russia had right to do it.

Ray: So what right did Russia have to invade in the first place?

I'll say regime change, posession of WMDs and association with al-queda terrorists.