WASHINGTON – Russian troops occupying South Ossetia, a breakaway province of the Republic of Georgia, have taken more territory by moving the border checkpoint in what analysts are calling "creeping annexation," according to a report in Joseph Farah's G2 Bulletin.
Movement of what the Russians term the "state border" of South Ossetia – which they annexed in 2008 along with the other Georgian breakaway province of Abkhazia – threatens to split U.S. ally Georgia along its main East-West Highway near the capital, Tbilisi.
By taking the additional territory, the Russians now occupy the two Georgian villages of Tsitelubani and Orchosani and have brought under their control a portion of the 520-mile Baku-Supsa oil pipeline that traverses Georgia from Azerbaijan to Turkey, where the oil then is sold to the Western market.
"How can Moscow's 'creeping annexation' be stopped, and what will happen if Russia decides to eventually annex a section of the East-West Highway? So far, neither the Georgian government's Western partners and allies seem to have a ready answer to that question," according to Vasili Rukhadze of the Washington think-tank Jamestown Foundation.
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By coming within a half-mile of Georgia's strategic East-West Highway, Russian troops are in a position to capture the thoroughfare and block it within 15 minutes, he said.
"But a viable strategy to this problem may be needed much sooner than many policymakers inside and outside of Georgia can imagine at this stage," he wrote in an article for the Jamestown Foundation's publication Eurasia Daily Monitor.
G2's request to the State Department to provide its strategy to deal with Moscow's "creeping annexation" of a critical Caucasus country to contain Russian expansion went unanswered.
Read the rest of this report, and more, at Joseph Farah's G2 Bulletin.
WND reported that since annexing Georgia's breakaway provinces and subsequently the Crimea in Ukraine, Putin's strategy appears to be to give Russia access to one of the major oil and natural gas pipelines outside Ukraine that provides energy to Europe.
The territory also would give Moscow a long-sought direct land link to Armenia, considered to be a key Russian satellite in the South Caucasus region.
The landline would permit Moscow to resupply its only military base outside the Russian Federation, a request it has made to the Georgian government that consistently has been rejected.
With such a land-link directly from the Russian Federation into Armenia, Moscow would geographically isolate Azerbaijan from the West, which then would prompt that country's possible return to the "Russian orbit," according to Rukhadze.
While world attention is focused on issues such as Iran's nuclear program and the Ukraine crisis, Russia has undertaken a move that could split a country of 4 million people in half.
Russia has been particularly critical of recent moves by Georgia to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which the United States backs but the Europeans, especially Germany and France, continue to oppose out of concern for agitating Moscow even more.
Read the rest of this report, and more, at Joseph Farah's G2 Bulletin.