Michael Totten, like Michael Yon, is self financed and he is also worthy of your support. He writes from Georgia.
The Truth About Russia in Georgia
Read the whole thing.
TBILISI, GEORGIA – Virtually everyone believes Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili foolishly provoked a Russian invasion on August 7, 2008, when he sent troops into the breakaway district of South Ossetia. “The warfare began Aug. 7 when Georgia launched a barrage targeting South Ossetia,” the Associated Press reported over the weekend in typical fashion.
Virtually everyone is wrong. Georgia didn’t start it on August 7, nor on any other date. The South Ossetian militia started it on August 6 when its fighters fired on Georgian peacekeepers and Georgian villages with weapons banned by the agreement hammered out between the two sides in 1994. At the same time, the Russian military sent its invasion force bearing down on Georgia from the north side of the Caucasus Mountains on the Russian side of the border through the Roki tunnel and into Georgia. This happened before Saakashvili sent additional troops to South Ossetia and allegedly started the war.
Cathy Young grew up in Moscow, writes for Reason magazine and The Weekly Standard and has some thoughts on the “victimization” of Russia which is being used as an excuse for the invasion. Here:
…The painful humiliation of Germany after World War II had one major positive aspect: The Nazi virus was purged from the nation’s system. Russia never truly confronted or rejected the evil of its Communist past. Yeltsin, to his credit, sought to do just that. He outlawed the Communist party (which successfully challenged the ban in court) and spoke of the Soviet Union as “the evil empire.” This changed under Putin, whose idea of resurgent Russian pride includes celebrating Soviet-era “accomplishments” while treating the crimes as deplorable, but fundamentally no worse than the blots on any other nation’s history.
The new Russia bristles at any effort to account for those crimes, be it Ukraine’s attempt to have the state-engineered famine of 1932-33 recognized as genocide by the United Nations or Estonia’s prosecution of veteran Communist Arnold Meri for his role in the deportation of Estonian “undesirables” in 1949. In July, the Russian foreign ministry issued a peevish protest against President Bush’s Captive Nations Week proclamation that mentioned “the evils of Soviet Communism and Nazi fascism,” decrying it as an attempt to “continue the Cold War.” “But how can it not continue,” asked Soviet-era dissident Alexander Podrabinek in an article on the EJ.ru website, “when those in charge of Russia’s foreign policy openly try to whitewash Communist ideology?”