I don’t see the Georgians giving up their essential sovereignty. They’ve paid too much for it to simply give it away. They’ll bargain with the Russians, who will find it that much harder, politically speaking, to restart the assault now that the Georgians are out of Ossetia and Abkhazia by the Kremlin’s own accounting.

What the Russians have over the Georgians is a blockade of their commercial lines of communication. But they will have that anyway, simply by controlling South Ossetia and Abkhazia, which is why the Georgians, despite having no cultural claim to those two places, wanted them. They are the Golan Heights of Georgia; not really theirs but required by military necessity. So what the Georgians will look for is something that will keep them from being garroted. But since that will mean the Georgians keeping what the Russians are unwilling to concede it will be a hard bargain to reach. It’s a bargain the Russians could have extracted from a prostrate foe. But Georgia, though wounded, is not prostrate.