[jyl]

Sounds like significant fighting. Not merely a few shots being exchanged across the border. Airstrikes and armour moving.

Georgia is not part of NATO, though it has US support. Perhaps Russia uses this oppty to annex this area of Georgia and send a message to other former Soviet republics. What would or could the US or NATO do about it?

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/09/world/europe/09georgia.html?ref=world

Mr. Utiashvili, the Georgian official, said Georgians had seen Russian forces, including “hundreds of soldiers and dozens of armored vehicles, including tanks,” move up the military highway into the Caucasus Mountains that ties the separatist enclave to Russia.

By morning, they had passed through a mountain tunnel into the northern portion of the enclave, he said. "They are on Georgian territory now.”

"We don’t know whether they are militias or regular Russian forces," he said. "As they carry heavy equipment, we think they must be regulars. We don’t know. We just know they are coming to attack us."

He said Georgian Su-25 ground attack airplanes had struck the convoy and that the Georgians believed they had caused casualties and destroyed Russian armored vehicles.

But a spokesman for Teimuraz Mamsurov, the president of the semiautonomous Russian republic of North Ossetia, which borders the disputed territory, said the Georgian planes had struck an automobile convoy shipping humanitarian aid from Vladikavkaz to South Ossetia.

He said he had no information about the sighting of Russian tanks.

The Georgian military fired on Russian fighter jets that bombed Georgian territory and strafed Georgian positions at about 11 a.m. Moscow time, Mr. Utiashvili said.