War in South Ossetia

It is extremely difficult to disentangle the rights and wrongs of the fighting between Russia and Georgia in South Ossetia. If - and it is a huge if - the news reports that I have seen are accurate, it would suggest that neither country has exactly covered itself in glory.

The Georgian government appears to have escalated an internal conflict and has been accused of breaking a cease-fire by doing so, but Russia has used this action as a pretext to invade another country.

Assuming we're not going to start world war three over this, the West has very limited capacity to intervene but it certainly appears that we should use whatever diplomatic leverage we have to urge both sides to seek a non-violent solution.

Since one of the participants is a permanent member of the UN security council they can veto any UN resolution on the issue, which means that the UN can be used for diplomatic options only.

I've seen the concern expressed in some places that if Russia "gets away" with this they will feel able to treat their neighbours as they please, including against those neighbouring countries which are members of NATO.

I don't agree with thas. The NATO treaty requires all members of the Alliance to come to the assistance of a member country which is attacked, but we don't have such a treaty obligation to Georgia. It would be extremely foolish for the Russian government to assume that NATO would not respond much more firmly to a direct attack on a NATO member than to a confused conflict between countries to whom we have no such treaty obligation. And whatever you may think of Vladimir Putin, he is not stupid.

Nevertheless, the situation in Ossetia represents a grave risk of all-out war between Russia and Georgia, which would be an extremely bad thing for almost everyone concerned.

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