Mike Sylwester:

I’m not so sure that the S. Ossetians would have acted so boldly had they not known that the Russians were willing to back them with substantial force. They ambushed Georgian police with IEDs and then called for volunteers from the North slopes of the Caucuses to help. Indeed, that was what Russia called their troops on the first day, as they moved through the pass. That rhetorical coordination should indicate the level of Russian involvement in this affair.

A good portion of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet sortied within days of the Georgian incursion into S. Ossetia — ready to fight, and land troops no less. This is no small undertaking. Russia’s fleet has not been well funded since the Soviet collapse. This year’s deployment of the Kuznetsov carrier group was a milestone in Russian fleet readiness.

When I factor in the recent repair of the rail line into Abkahzia, the drone shoot-down incident earlier this year, and the PKK bombing of that famous Georgian pipeline a week ago (when was the last time the PKK operated outside of Turkey/N.Iraq/N.E.Iran?), it becomes clear to me that the Russian invasion was in the works for a good while. This was no sudden response to “war crimes” real or imagined. The fact that Russia now publicly labels the Georgian President a war criminal suggests to me that they will stay in Georgia until such time that Saakashvili is delivered to a Russian tribunal, and a Russian puppet takes charge in Tbilisi.