South Ossetia

They’ll always have Paris

An EU report is expected to fault Saakashvili for the Ossetia war

WEEKEND ROUNDUP

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev says Georgia’s invasion of South Ossetia was his country’s equivalent of September 11. He also likens Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili to a “pooch” and describes him as an “unpredictable, pathological and mentally unstable drug abuser.” This guy’s all class.

Human Rights Watch released a report  today that reveals the widespread burning and looting of ethnic Georgian villages in South Ossetia.

Dick Cheney to visit Georgia and other countries in the region. Because he just likes to be helpful.

Short-range Russian ballistic missiles in South Ossetia, anyone?

The New Yorker editor must have cursed the way his magazine’s publication schedule popped out a double issue during the busiest two weeks in the summer. So he’s had to watch, a little helpless, for two weeks while Solzhenitsyn died and Russia launched its first shooting war on foreign soil in decades. This has been more than a busy couple of weeks to David Remnick, who was a great Moscow bureau reporter for the Washington Post and whose book Lenin’s Tomb is one of the definitive chronicles of the Soviet Union’s collapse. I have been waiting to see what he would make of all this. His column is now up on his magazine’s website. It has been worth the wait.

This business of a U.S. ballistic-missile defense system in Poland is a long story, but if you’re still reading my posts on the Georgia conflict, you will almost certainly have noticed the bellicose reaction of a senior Russian general, who said:

Must-reads: Rosie DiManno and Colby Cosh on Olympic politics; Janet Bagnall on PromArt; Marcus Gee on Georgia; Don Martin on that fall election you’re all dying to vote in.

” I have staked my country’s fate on the West’s rhetoric about democracy and liberty.”

Must-reads: Daphne Bramham on Hong Kong’s future; Henry Aubin and Gary Mason on police oversight, or lack thereof; Margaret Wente on Chinese gymnastics; Peter Worthington on Russia and Georgia.