Fighting over Georgia… in quotes

“The Russian army is trying to enforce peace, and to do that, we have to attack the Georgian military,” which is shelling South Ossetian villages and towns from outside the region’s nominal border, Sergei Ivanov, Russia’s deputy prime minister, said on CNN.

Are there any additional reasons, usually ones denied?

“We don’t want regime change in Tbilisi. Our goal is the peaceful settlement of the conflict,” said Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman Boris Malakhov. “However, the fate of Saakashvili is in the hands of his own people.”

“I’d like to say straightaway that regime change is an American expression. We do not use such an expression. But sometimes there are occasions, and we know from history, that there are different leaders who come to power, either democratically or semi-democratically, and they become an obstacle,” says Ambassador Vitaly Churkin.

Could a reverse-Milosevic await Saakashvili…

“We have to stop the genocide,” said Sergei Ivanov, Russia’s deputy prime minister.

Saakashvili aside, but for now…

Georgian collapse “certainly raised concerns about Georgia’s reliability as a transit route” says Julian Lee, a specialist on the Caspian at the Centre for Global Energy Studies in London so, as a result of Russia’s proximity bombing of the pipeline, British Petroleum duly closed down the pipeline it operates in Georgia, days after having BPs CEO driven out of Russia and the defeated UKs Prime Minister Gordon Brown can only wield a rhetorical scimitar that “Russia’s military actions would damage its relations with other countries.”

Such as which?

“This is clearly part of a bigger game, which is the expansion of NATO,” Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini said. “Today Georgia’s entry [into NATO] is more complicated,” he said. “It doesn’t behoove us to pit ourselves against Russia. Russia is a strategic partner.”

Could Sarkozy’s Moscow visit confirm this?

“I think what you have confirmed here is good news,” that Russia stopped the opertions. “A cease-fire now has to take shape… We must draw up a rapid calendar so that each side can go back to the positions of before the crisis.”

Is Russia backward looking as Sarkozy?

“I cannot see us accepting this French draft of the resolution,” says Vitaly Churkin although Russia’s deputy chief of General Staff, Col.-Gen. Anatoly Nogovitsyn suggested that “some sort of international mediation effort to watch how both sides comply with a cease-fire agreement” is in the offing.

So who is to blame?

“It was Germany that led the opposition …for Georgia… not [to] be allowed to enter NATO. We presumably won’t know for some time what the precise calculations were inside the Kremlin when it came to the decision to send troops into Georgia, but one can surely assume that the German position did nothing to discourage Russia’s plans,” write Gary Schmitt, director of the American Enterprise Institute’s program on advanced strategic studies and Mauro Lorenzo, an AEI resident fellow.

However, unnamed sources paraphrased in the media say that “many officials in the U.S. government who have worked on the Russia relationship in recent years said, President Bush lionized Mr. Saakashvili as a model for democracy in the region to a point that the Georgian leader may have held unrealistic expectations about the amount of support he might receive from the U.S. and the West.”

“The Bush administration didn’t in any way encourage Saakashvili’s move against the Russians, but it didn’t do enough to rein him in,” said Charles Kupchan, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. “It encouraged the creation of a Georgian president who was too big for his britches.”