Region: Caucasus Wall
The Sofia Echo | 13th August 2010

Two years after war broke out between Russia and Georgia over two Russian secessionist areas, the confrontation has become yet another frozen conflict in the post-Soviet space.

With the war anniversary looming, Russia's president Dmitry Medvedev told reporters in Moscow during the first week of August that "normal relations" will be impossible as long as Mikhail Saakashvili is president of Georgia.

From Tbilisi, the Georgian president told troops gathered on August 4 at a military cemetery that Russia was "the enemy" and that his government's survival was part of the "irreversible dismantling of old empires and imperial sphere of influence."

On the ground, there is little movement after a war that killed 850 people and displaced 35 000. In March, a lone border crossing opened between Georgia and Russia. Sporadic charter flights link the two capitals.

Cut off from Russia, young Georgians increasingly do not speak Russian. In a break with two centuries of close ties, a generation of Georgians is growing up more orientated to London and Paris than to Moscow and St Petersburg...

Read more at The Sofia Echo.

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