Georgia-Russian conflict. Just my opinion. Somehow shared by many.

A bit cut off the world as I am here in my internship destination I planned Sunday-Monday evenings to find out how the Olympics are doing. But already on the evening on Saturday - i randomly opened my mailbox and some invitations that I would normally consider a spam freezed me and made me read, read, read.

Georgia... I have for quite a while considered Caucasus the next region to demonstrate the growth of Eastern Europe - and always hoped that being that close to Russia will not get them off this perspective - yet now, another war can be said to have broken through.

The best source of information are latest BBC Europe news.

All in all - I have spent a while trying to understand the reality but I'm quite sure I don't know all the backgrounds so I shall not call this the complete fault of Putin as my mind is telling me to. But what still strikes is - most of the news I read were about "the prime-minister of Russia Vladimir Putin" doing this or that, having another discussion or expressing an opinion. Reminds me of reading about "the president of Russia Putin" - some things never change? There is one man leading this country, no matter what his official position is said to be. And Russia's politics has his face.

Putin is not even the president anymore, his candidature for prime minister was supported by the Duma coalition which was formed of his own party, and he himself was listed as a parliament candidate before he even ended his presidency term. Herewith we have a clear sign of missing separation of powers as legislative and executive powers were sharing one of the key figures at the point of elections - and at least for me Russia is herewith not a democracy!! So how long is this undemocratic power going to perform what they want?

A quote from a Georgian student in BBC(also see other individual perspectives):

"The current war is not a battle between Georgia and Ossetia - it is a battle between Georgia and Russia..."
I don't know about Ossetians but I'm quite sure I have seen russians fool around with the minds of Estonian Russians. Also I can't find it anymore but in one of the videos there was a NATO membership map - NATO countries are starting to surround Russia: EU earlier and now , from the other side - the Caucasus.

From the Saakasvili interview published in BBC : "it's a never-ending story - Russia has claims to Crimea in Ukraine, to parts of Baltic countries, parts of eastern Europe and if they will have free hand and free right now here in Georgia - everybody will be in trouble."

They take Georgia, guess who comes next?

PS! I go to sleep having no idea what happened at the Olympics, simply hoping Ann is ok, hoping this all can somehow be fixed.... but.... It's easy to destroy, it's hard to build up again. The indirect result of riots in Tallinn in my opinion can be seen till now - and this all will have quite an inpact on the future of Georgia...