Here’s a quick informal poll: Who has heard news of Russia’s recent troop buildup in the South Ossetia region of Georgia?
Chances are, nobody has heard of it.
According to a Newsweek interview dated April 11, President Mikheil Saakashvili of Georgia claims:
A week ago Russian tanks arrived in South Ossetia. We have information that there are about 5,000 Russian troops in the territory of South Ossetia, and 5,000 troops in Abkhazia.
A week before April 11, Russian tanks were apparently rolling into South Ossetia. One might immediately think that there was something else occurring in the world about that time; and indeed there was. President Obama was in Strasbourg, France, at a NATO summit.
That’s right, Russia timed its troop buildup to coincide with the NATO summit.
So why is this slowly leaking through the cracks now? This morning, Jackson Diehl wrote an editorial in the Washington Post containing the following paragraph:
Those aren't the only signs that the new medicine isn't taking. Europeans commonly blamed Bush for Russia's aggressiveness -- they said he ignored Moscow's interests and pressed too hard for European missile defense and NATO membership for Georgia and Ukraine. So Hillary Clinton made a show of pushing a "reset" button, and Obama offered the Kremlin a new arms control agreement while putting missile defense and NATO expansion on a back burner.
Yet in recent weeks Russia has deployed thousands of additional troops as well as tanks and warplanes to the two breakaway Georgian republics it has recognized, in blatant violation of the cease-fire agreement that ended last year's war. The threat of another Russian attack on Georgia seems to be going up rather than down.
This is the best coverage that NewsBusters could find of the recent Russian troop movements – and that’s no exaggeration.
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