This morning's trip around the blogroll unearthed a piece by Nikolas Gvosdev in The Washington Realist about the Georgian missile thing from last week.

Mr. Gvosdev, editor of The National Interest, lays out three possibilities for the event in question:

If we rule out that the missile launch and its subsequent impact in Georgia was some sort of accident, we have three main possibilities.

One possibility--and an explanation embraced by some circles in Russia--is that the government of President Mikheil Saakashvili manufactured this incident.

[T]his was an operation conceived of and given the blessing of senior figures in the Kremlin--maybe not President Putin himself, but done in a Henry II style--"rid me of this troublesome priest".

Finally, what appears to be the most likely--but no less troubling--local "frontier" elements working with South Ossetians. There is of course precedent in Russian history for commanders on the borders to act with no instructions (or in defiance of instructions) from the center, but this isn't 1783.

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Naturally, you should read the whole thing; I've only excerpted parts of the story. One wonders just what's going on out there.

Posted by: Country Pundit at 01:34 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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