The Georgia (and Russia) Off Our Minds

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On our show two weeks ago about the death of Anna Politkovskaya we ended up learning not just about the life and work of a brave Russian journalist but about some of the recent stories she was covering. The most urgent one, as outlined by Masha Gessen, was the worsening (and fascinating) relationship between Russia and Georgia.

Some of the threads here, in no particular order: the round-ups, arrests, and deportations of ethnic Georgians in Moscow; the arrest of a Russian spy-ring in Georgia; Georgia’s NATO aspirations; Georgia’s early independence from the Soviet Union — an independence that still sticks in the Russian craw; the subsequent loss of Georgia’s provinces South Ossetia and Abkhazia, possibly fomented by Russia; the recent completion of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline, which takes oil from Azerbaijan through Georgia to Turkey; and, mixed in with all of this, how the tensions between Russia and Georgia illustrate some of the broader realities of the post-Soviet, post-Cold War world.

But to begin: Have you been following this escalating tension? What’s your own take?