Here's a CTV.ca feature: Georgia conflict marks turning point

A few things of interest that for space's sake, couldn't make it into the story:

- U of T prof Waldemar Schrobanski noted that Soviet dictator Josef Stalin (a native Georgian) drew many of the boundaries that are in dispute today. Stalin thought everyone would just became Soviets and all this nationalism stuff would just go away. That's not the way it went down.

- Geography makes Georgia important and makes for the tangled geopolitics of the area. Armenia is to its south, and Armenia has very close relations with Russia. Both Armenia and Georgia are largely Orthodox Christian. There is an Armenian enclave within Azerbaijan, which sits to the east, called Nagorno-Karabakh. It was the scene of a vicious conflict in the 1990s. Azerbaijan, a largely Muslim state, is rich in fossil fuels. Oil and natural gas from there and elsewhere in the Caspian Sea basin flows westward through Georgia to a port in Turkey. Azerbaijan, a "managed democracy," tries to walk a tightrope between the West and Russia, according to the BBC.

- Do you remember Ingushetia,  Chechnya, or Dagestan? These Muslim-dominant areas sit on Georgia's northern border in Russia's North Caucasus, just to the east of North Ossetia (another, Kabardino-Balkaria, sits to the west). Do you remember the Beslan school hostage-taking? Beslan sits within North Ossetia. In his 2000 book Eastward to Tartary, U.S. writer Robert Kaplan described the Caucasus as the new, strategically important fault line between East and West. Are you starting to see why? 

- Ossetians are a distinct ethnic group and make up about two-thirds the population of South Ossetia. According to the BBC, Ossetians have traditionally had good relations with Russians, who have made it easy for both Ossetians and Abkhazians to obtain Russian passports.

- Georgia and Russia have been jostling each other in recent years, enough to signal that something could possibly blow. Here's a BBC timeline of the crisis back to Aug. 7. Here's a fuller BBC timeline that starts in 1801. It mentions many of the lesser flare-ups in Russo-Georgian relations.

- Kaplan wrote the following: "... It is hard to imagine a Western government sending troops to, say, Syria, Georgia, or Azerbaijan were they to disintegrate. Only oil pumped in large quantities will represent enough of an interest for us to intervene."

- There is a lot of oil and gas in the greater Caspian Sea basin. See this U.S. Department of Energy backgrounder.

- The U.S. is also trying to cultivate its relations with Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan, two former Soviet republics in Central Asia, both bordering the Caspian Sea, that have large energy reserves. Uzbekistan, which also has some energy reserves, allowed the U.S. to establish some military bases there after 9/11. However, Uzbekistan considers Russia to be its most reliable ally.

- Given the recent history of bad blood between Georgia and Russia, why would Georgia's President Mikhail Saakashvili launch military action against South Ossetia? Was there some clumsy diplomacy by the U.S. that made Georgia feel tougher than it should? On the face of it, it doesn't make sense for Georgia, a country of 4.4 million, to put itself into a shooting war with Russia, pop. 142.5 million.

- The U.S. has helped train Georgia's military.

- There are a number of former Warsaw Pact countries that now belong to NATO: Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic (1999); Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, and Slovakia (2004). Here are the NATO member countries and the partner countries. Both Georgia and Russia are partner countries.