In Black Earth, Andrew Meier’s moving account of his travels across the so-called “five points” of Russia (Moscow, Grozny, Norilsk, Vladivostok, St. Petersburg), you can find the most depressing and heartrending accounts of the war in Chechnya, with the Russian perspective that the Caucasus will eternally be at war with Russia, or each other.
Months ago, another part of the Caucasus was in crisis, as Georgia accused Russia of firing rockets into a village in the Kodori Gorge, the only part of Abkhazia under Tblisi’s control. I lost track of the story, but the basics of it were it was essentially unprovable, but not unlikely (I would appreciate anyone filling in my gap in knowledge). This is relevant because today Georgia has again accused Russia of firing munitions inside its territory, this time away from either of the contested provinces.
Does this signify anything? I don’t know—I don’t even know if that was a real Russian attack, or posturing from Sakaashvili. It could mean another round of Georgia-v.-Russia op-eds and media blitzes, or it could mean nothing at all. But tensions remains ever-present, and apparently just as high as they were last year.
This post was written by...
Joshua Foust – author of 1771 posts on Registan.net.
Joshua Foust is a Fellow at the American Security Project and the author of Afghanistan Journal: Selections from Registan.net. His research focuses primarily on Central and South Asia. Joshua is a correspondent for The Atlantic and a columnist for PBS Need to Know. Joshua appears regularly on the BBC World News, Aljazeera, and international public radio. Joshua is also a regular contributor to Foreign Policy’s AfPak Channel, and his writing has appeared in the New York Times, Reuters, and the Christian Science Monitor. Follow him on twitter: @joshuafoust