Russia vows to protect S Ossetia

Source: BBC News

Russia's prime minister has vowed to protect the breakaway Georgian regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, a year after it recognised their independence.

Speaking at the opening of a direct gas pipeline to South Ossetia, Vladimir Putin said his country would not allow any "military escapades" by Georgia.
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Earlier, Russia's military said it had halved its presence in the two regions.
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Mr Kokoity thanked Mr Putin for his support and criticised Nato and the United States for training the Georgian military, a move which he said might prompt further conflict.

Read more: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/8223443.stm

...ol' Vlad is still pulling the strings!

And overwhelmingly supported independence from Georgia.

They're overwhelmingly not ethnically Russian, just as somebody born in Paris with the name Muhammed Abdul Rahim, home language Arabic, both parents from Algeria would not be ethnically French. Most Russians left during the earlier hostilities, with the period of stagnation that followed being not very propitious for any but smugglers and those in the S. Ossetian government.

However, they're mostly Russian passport holders, since there were perks and privileges to having a Russian passport. For instance, the S. Ossetian passport was recognized by precisely nobody, and if that's all you had, you couldn't leave that little post stamp of a territory.

Now, this makes for a very strange situation: An independent country in which most citizens have passports issued by another country, claiming them as their own.

Are they mostly Russian? By passport, yes. By actual citizenship, de jure, they're S. Ossetian (if you recognize that "country's" independence) or Georgian (if you don't) . By ethnicity, no.

They're like the Sorbs 60-80 years ago, they just don't know it.

I have trouble taking the affair seriously. The country is less viable than the West Bank, under Israeli proposals, would be.

I know that during the Stalin era he (curiously enough, a Georgian) set up a program to transplant ethnic Russians throughout the Union. Have they all moved back?

the smugglers.