Attacking South Ossetia is synonymous to attacking the entire republic of Ossetia (whatever any one could say, Ossetians in the north enjoy the sovereignty of the Russian Federation), is a tragic but not unexpected happening. Under the puppet regime of Saakashvili Georgia has no choice. There is another question that is much more important and complicated. The question is: does the Russian “elite” have its freedom of choice? What would be supreme for the working out of Moscow’s line of conduct regarding the war on South Ossetia. Will that be the fear of Russian bureaucracy at all levels of losing what they have stolen and hidden in offshore companies (because the US State Department knows about “the stashes” of Russian ruling circles abroad, and it can at any one time freeze their bank accounts) or the continuity of defence of Russia’s strategic national interests? The very first steps of top Russian leaders imbue hope that they would develop the second scenario.

An unequivocal and responsible statement needs to be made to the effect that the attack on Ossetia was an attack on Russia! There are people who suggest that Ossetia should be helped by volunteers and arms, but that is what needed to be done earlier, in Yugoslavia. It was not done! And now we are asking the US on our bended knees not to deploy their silo-hidden missiles too close to our borders. It was not accidental that they directed the ruler of Georgia to Ossetia, counting it as a weak link whose geography could provoke a blitzkrieg to snatch - first South Ossetia – in a matter of hours counting on Moscow’s non-interference and ritual protests. But it did not turn out that way. As Dmitry Medvedev said, the people of the multinational North Caucasus support the Ossetian nation. These are exactly the conditions for the support of volunteers and arms, but the first thing that needs to be done is to declare Russia’s military presence in the zone of this military conflict to be able to rebuff the aggressor.

The Georgian attack on Ossetia was an attempt to use Georgian hands and knives to grab another piece of Russia’s geopolitical space for the Yankees to swallow. The transformation of large geopolitical territories in the process of NATO’s eastward “expansion” is painful. The tragedy of Ossetia is part of a story that a number of republics existing on the territory of the former USSR that are de facto independent but formally unacknowledged by the international community need to be protected both against ethnic violence in the interests of people living in these states and for the purpose of not making them tools of a large-scale geopolitical destabilization of the Russian Federation.

Following the dismemberment of the USSR that crowned the four decades of the “cold war” virtually all the post-Soviet states, except Russia began to orient themselves at a rapid violent assimilation of small non-autochthonal ethnic groups and the building of mono-national and mono-confessional states. The issue of acknowledgment /non-acknowledgment of Abkhazia, South Ossetia and other de facto states on the territory of the former USSR is not an issue within the framework of the policies of unification of the global geopolitical space – these states will be recognized! The only question is who will recognize them first –Russia or the West?

There is an almost open current threat of destabilisation of Russia’s southern territories should it enter the “non-permitted” zone around the unrecognized post-Soviet republics. Western strategists agree to give Moscow the role of showing itself as a state that is incapable of protecting its citizens allowing Western states to have the final say about the fates of Abkhazians, Ossetians and other Russia’s nations.

Speaking purely in terms of state borders, many Caucasian peoples, including Armenians, Azeris, some ethnic groups in Dagestan were divided after the fall of the USSR There are also nations divided by the administrative borders of the “subjects” of the Russian Federation. Should Russia lose a war in the North Caucasus, all the administrative borders would become null and void. After that NATO member-states would re-distribute limitrophe territories, and highly likely that the Caucasus would become a Turkish protectorate.

Could Georgia profit from a war? Undoubtedly, no unless destruction in a war mincing-machine a sizeable number of unemployed young people and inadequately trained youths whom Saakashvili has sent to recruiting stations is the current Tbilisi regime’s victory.

No state that is currently responsible for the issue of the future of the failed Georgian state is currently interested to support it where retention of Georgia’s “territorial integrity” and “national sovereignty” within the borders of the former Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic is concerned. Should there be a big scuffle, Georgia would be torn in pieces to become a formation of small mono-ethnic semi-states that would be grabbed by the victors.