Back Towards The Locus

Via Global Voices Online – via the Caucasian Knot, via Nosemonkey – the Russian journalist Mikhail Romanov writes from his hotel in Tskhinvali, the pitiful capital of South Ossetia:

“The city is under heavy howitzer and mortar fire. An endless cannonade. I’ve seen many wounded people.

Peacekeepers are commenting succinctly: “This is war.”

I was planning to leave tomorrow, a car was supposed to pick me up at 5 in the morning. Now it’s not clear whether it’ll pick me up. In general, nothing is clear.”

Upon returning from the Olympics, Putin described the violence in South Ossetia as “genocide“, while Medvedev has been even more worryingly strident, declaring that “we won’t allow the death of our compatriots go unpunished“.

Georgian forces have been accused of targeting South Ossetian villages and residents, as well as Russian troops. Russia’s ‘retaliation‘, however, has included the bombing of the Georgian town of Gori, and Saakashvili has claimed that hotels, pipelines and residential areas have been targeted. Attacking Georgian territory, of course, contradicts the assertion that troops are merely protecting South Ossetia.

As Russian attacks continue to advance, the US’s support for Georgia becomes more pronounced.

This morning Lenin speculated that “if [Georgia] truly intends to withdraw 1,000 of its troops from Iraq to attack the South Ossetian independence movement, I would expect they had to ask Bush nicely first“.The foreknowledge intrinsic to this claim is disputed, and has been indirectly matched by Georgia, whose Security Council stated that “we have already communicated to our American friends that we are going to withdraw half our contingent of soldiers in Iraq within days because we are under Russian aggression“. As the Daily Kos has spotted, the US has already agreed to give transport to the returning Georgian troops.

There is nothing particularly peculiar about this, as Georgia and the US have been clasped in a diplomatic embrace since the former wisely latched on to the Coalition of the Willing. At the announcement of the Georgia Train and Equip Program, Rumself described their relationship as “multi-faceted…it involves diplomatic and economic, as well as security issues“. Last month, Condoleeza Rice visited Georgia, and US soldiers trained with troops from Georgia, Azerbaijan, Armenia and Ukraine “in the spirit of the NATO Partnership for Peace program“.

And so the people are sandwiched, as ever, between monoliths.