Friday, August 22, 2008

The Boomerang

Among a varied crop of recent articles in Yezhednevny Zhurnal, defence analyst Alexander Golts reflects that Russia's "crushing reply" to Georgia is returning to it like a boomerang in the form of international condemnation, and makes the awkward-to-challenge point that a victory that is purely military is not really a victory at all. Commenting on the split between Ukraine's President Yuschchenko and Prime Minister Yulia Timoshenko over the events in South Ossetia, Inna Bulkina notes that in her foreign policy outlook, Timoshenko is aligning herself with the very countries which have been most passive about the Russian invasion and its consequences, and which would be least inclined to help Ukraine in a crisis. Meanwhile, in a review of US press reaction to the Georgia conflict, Masha Lipman does her best to convince her readers that the recent columns by correspondents like Michael Dobbs and Charles King, whose line is essentially that the trouble in Georgia is "not all Russia's fault", are only harbingers of things to come.

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