(Photo from Time Magazine)The Axis of Moscow -- Wall Street Journal
It's lonely out there for Vladimir Putin
Where would Russia be without Daniel Ortega? Even more isolated than the Kremlin now finds itself after its August adventure in Georgia.
Two months after the war in the Caucasus, Mr. Ortega's Nicaragua is the lone country to follow Moscow's recognition of the "independence" -- in effect, Russian annexation -- of Georgia's South Ossetia and Abkhazia provinces. Given Russia's serious diplomatic onslaught, that's an embarrassing outcome for Vladimir Putin.
Consider the rogue's gallery that refused to go along: Hugo Chávez's Venezuela, the Castros' Cuba, Bolivia, Iran and Syria. The club of seven authoritarian former Soviet republics known as the Collective Security Treaty Organization also demurred. Even Moscow's puppet autocrat in Belarus, Aleksander Lukashenko, deferred to his toothless parliament; in other words, nyet, for now. Russia was rebuffed by China and India at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization.
There is of course a long line of goons happy to take military, energy or economic handouts from the Kremlin, though the dramatic drop in oil prices and Russian stocks will limit its ability to buy people off. Mr. Lukashenko could well be holding out his support for cheaper natural gas. But Russia's erratic and aggressive behavior in the Caucasus has apparently given even him pause about its possible intentions against Belarus.
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My Comment: The seizure of two small provinces from Georgia was never worth the effort. The Kremlin badly miscalculated the cost of their actions .... particularly with their closest allies.
1 comment:
Man I'm getting so tired of people forgetting the fact that the whole south-ossetian population was on the brink of being wiped out by a ethnic nationalisic government. If Russia didn't stepped in 60 000 ossetians would have been killed and some months after that a large amount of the Abkhaz population. Now do ignorent naive people really think that destroying two cultures that have been terrorised by the Georgian governement since 1922 is a no problem at all. Should the whole world just sit there and watch a show of ethnic cleansing. Don't you people have brains at all to see that even the Georgian citizens got poorer and poorer since 2004 when Saakasvhili came to power with his only mission to put 1 billion dollars into his army each-year with the pledge to take back what he thinks is Georgian soil that should be for georgians and nobody else but georgians? Where are people history lessons that learn what the real conflict is behind this war. It is not Russia against Georgia. It's Georgia against Ossetia and Abkhazia and Russia against the US.
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