What Is This World Coming To?

Thousands of troops, backed by hundreds of tanks, artillery and other heavy weaponry, began rumbling through the North Caucasus on Monday, as Russia began its largest military exercises since last year’s war with Georgia.

The Caucasus 2009 war games are being seen by many experts as a warning shot for nearby Georgia, where the government says it has rearmed armed forces and where NATO recently wrapped up its own exercises.

Experts say the exercises may also be signal to the United States that Russia will give no ground on its efforts to maintain an exclusive sphere of influence in Georgia and other former Soviet republics. The games run through July 6 — the day that President Barack Obama arrives in Moscow for a highly anticipated summit with Russia’s Dmitry Medvedev.

Defense Ministry officials say more than 8,500 troops will take part, along with nearly 200 tanks, armored vehicles, 100 artillery units and several units from Russia’s Black Sea naval fleet.

Russian tanks rolled towards the capital of South Ossetia and fighters bombed Georgian air bases after Georgia launched attacks on rebels in the Georgian province of South Ossetia. Russian forces suffered about a dozen dead and 150 wounded, according to Russian news agencies, but the civilian toll of dead and wounded is currently numbered in the thousands.

South Ossetia is primarily inhabited by ethnic Ossetians whose native language is related to Farsi, or ethnic Persian.

By tradition, the Ossetians have had good relations with Russians and were regarded as loyal citizens, first of the Russian empire and later of the Soviet Union. They sided with the Kremlin when Bolshevik forces occupied Georgia in the early 1920s and, as part of the carve-up which followed, the South Ossetian Autonomous Region was created in Georgia and North Ossetia was formed in Russia. Read the rest of this entry »