Russia vs Georgia

[Mike]

This is an interesting one. On the ground it is a major super power invading a neighbour in what is probably the first non US lead invasion for quite a while. It seems to be a re-assertion of Russian Imperialism and in one sense could be a response to the US's constant war mongering and shooting down of non lethal satellites.

On another level their are wide reports of Russia conducting large scale Cyber Attacks using its Moscow based servers to launch denial of service attacks on the Government websites. This is to the point of the democratically elected government using a Google Blogging Site to keep the message from the government getting out to the international community and could the the first example of a hacker cyber war for control of the internet. I wonder who will have the best programmers. . . .

This seems like a very dangerous situation to me as it seems to be an aggressive move on a ex-member state of the USSR in a bid to control the energy supply routes into Europe. The UN Security Council have been meeting and considering what to do about this issue. As of yet I believe this has been going on for about 2-5 days and the only thing to have come out of this is a George Bush statement 'strongly discouraging' Russia from pressing on with their attacks.

Whilst we don't want to start WWIII by using the sword before the pen you can't help but feel sorry for Georgia who are definitely getting a thumping and the population are suffering during our wait. You can bet that Russia will not be a quick altercation if the US or UN takes a particularly strong stance on this. Anyone else to predict that Gas prices are going to rise this winter with Russia potentially in control of many energy routes into Europe?

Will this be another World War in the making that people will look back on in future years and study at school?

[Mike]

Well the military action has been declared over after 5 days. . . . i would love to know what was said to make the decision to halt the attacks. Though not to the point of having to have made the decision.

[Mike]

There still seems to be some confusion as to what is actually happening here. Georgia may be launching internet attacks on Russian newspapers, Russia may be sending the tanks back in. Come on people, what is actually going on here?!

[mr_e]

It's just crazy, basically. The Russians were alledgedly responding to Georgia's move on South Ossetian seperatist rebels... which apparently involved a rocket attack... which killed some Russian peacekeepers. If that's true, then it's a major fuck-up on Georgia's part. However, Russia's response was very heavy-handed, and isn't going to do them any favours on the international stage, but I don't think they care, up to a point.

I can only assume it's partly energy-related, seeing as Georgia has one of the major pipeline routes that actually avoids Russia running through it. I believe they were actually forced to shut it. The Russian government may have internal pressures that need it to be seen to be tough on attacks on its citizens, but I'm not up on their national politics at all.

It's all plans within plans, and we may never properly know the sequence of events that led up to this.

[Mike]

There are two pipelines running through the country. One owned by BP and the other nearer to the Turkish boarder. They also have ports that serve as a energy route into Europe. . . . co-incidence?