Georgia was just the start..

IHT - Prime Minister Vladimir Putin of Russia on Thursday accused Ukraine of having sent weapons and military personnel to assist Georgia during its war with Russia. The accusation came as Russia announced a memorandum of understanding for handling natural gas sales to Ukraine after Putin met with the Ukrainian prime minister, Yulia Tymoshenko. ...... Russian officials and some Ukrainian lawmakers have said that Ukraine helped arm the pro-Western Georgia before the war.

The Russian military has said that antiaircraft missiles supplied by Ukraine shot down four Russian warplanes during the conflict. Putin said that arms sales may have continued even after the war began, and that some of the weapons had been operated by Ukrainians during the fighting. "The weapons could have been supplied during the military action, and it was operated by Ukrainian specialists," he said. "That is a crime. That's an attempt to set Russian and Ukrainian people against each other."

IHT - The tattered Georgian flags, the NATO-style uniforms and the U.S. assault rifles clutter a small corner of the Russian Central Armed Forces Museum in Moscow. They are trophies from Russia's recent war with Georgia, gathered haphazardly but displayed with a clear message. "Now people understand who started this," said Aleksandr Nikonov, the museum's director. And, he did not have to add, who finished it. ...... After decades of embarrassing military defeats, in Afghanistan in the 1980s and in the first Chechnya war in the 1990s, Russia is once again a winner.

The message there is, stay out of Georgia or you're next, don't help them, don't fight for them or with them and we'll leave you alone. A sort of, let the crocodile chase the other fellow and as long as you can run faster, he'll be the one that gets eaten. It's up to Ukraine and the rest of the crowd in the neighborhood to figure out that once the crocodile is done with Georgia, he'll get hungry again.

On the plus side, Ivan seems unwilling to get into any sort of war with the U.S. Well, at least publicly that is, but I trust Putin as far as I could throw a fully-laded oil tanker, so you make up your own mind on this.

IHT - On the day European Union monitors began patrolling Georgian territory, President Dmitri Medvedev of Russia said there were no ideological grounds for a new Cold War, or any other kind of war, with the United States. ...... "We do not have such ideological differences around which a new cold or any other kind of war could start," Medvedev said at a news conference after talks with Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero of Spain outside St. Petersburg, Russia.

I think we can believe them on this front, because why would they get into any direct confrontation with the U.S. Putin may be a lot of things, but he's not stupid. He knows he won't win another cold war or an outright war with the U.S. Besides there are far easier and less expensive ways to hinder and stick-it to America, in fact, they can even make a tidy profit in the process.

NYT - Russia continued its international muscle-flexing on Friday, strengthening its ties to Venezuela through a $1 billion military loan and a new oil consortium as it announced an upgrade of its own military focusing on nuclear deterrence and permanent combat readiness.
FOX News - Prime Minister Vladimir Putin says relations with Latin America will be a foreign policy priority for the Russian government. Putin, who is meeting with visiting Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, says Russia is willing to discuss further military contacts with Venezuela and help it develop nuclear energy for peaceful purposes. Chavez said during Thursday's meeting that close ties between Venezuela and Russia would strengthen a multi-polar world.
Times Online - Russia defied the United States yesterday by announcing plans to sell military hardware to Iran and Venezuela. The head of the state arms exporter said that he was negotiating to sell antiaircraft systems to Iran despite American objections. Russia has already delivered 29 Tor-M1 missile systems under a $700 million (£386 million) deal with Iran in 2005. “Contacts between our countries are continuing and we do not see any reason to suspend them,” Anatoli Isaikin, the general director of Rosoboronexport, told the RIA-Novosti news agency at an arms fair in South Africa.

It's a type of outsourcing, let others do your fighting, it's cheaper for you and better still, when it's time for some blow-back, it won't be you in the firing line. They understand the western worlds' weakness. George Bush and John McCain might not fall for this outsourcing crap and still point the finger at Russia and want to punish them, but they are not Vladimir Putin. They, unlike Putin and the chicoms, answer to the average westerner, come voting time.

There in lies our weakness, after years of all-cultures-are-equal, we-are-just-as-bad, Israeli apartheid, No-War, belief-in-nothing, soft-power, guns-are-evil, global-warming, socialism-ain't-so-bad indoctrination, the average westerner either doesn't see a problem with Iran & Venezuela going nuclear or being able to defend themselves against an imperialistic America or they don't have the time to figure it out. The consequences of these events don't affect him directly, so he won't see it until it's too late.

And he is not entirely to blame, our western media is not interested in this sort of thing, they won't tell us about this on the evening news. If Americans made Muslim terrorists wear panties on their heads or served them bacon & egg sandwiches, they'll tell you. But if Putin is telling Ukraine to walk away from Georgia or gas supplies might be delayed and accidents happen, you won't hear any of that on the evening news, just that America's invasion of Iraq brought about the Russian liberation of South Ossetia and Abkhazia!

Will the westerner stop depending on the mainstream media? Will he switch off Big Brother and Survivor, put down the Celebrity weekly to scratch around on the internet and figure out what's going on for himself? He'd better, lest he find out that ignorance is not bliss but can actually be very painful.