Legality of Russia's involment

Russia's involvement in the conflict is indeed completely legal and actually mandatory according to international agreements between Georgia, Russia and South Ossetia. I suppose this may indeed come as a surprise to many of you. In accordance with international agreements, including the agreement of 1999 between Georgia and South Ossetia's separatists, Russia does not only execute peacemaking functions, but is obliged, in case one party breaks the cease-fire agreement, to defend the other party, which is exactly what the Russian government is doing in South Ossetia. Furthermore, the two breakaway regions of Georgia South Ossetia and Abkhazia have signed an agreement that, if one of them attacked, the other is supposed to offer military assistance. What I find really striking is that this piece of information gets censored in Western 'free' media and is never being reported.

It is interesting as well to read some comments that some nations such as Georgia can exert their right to be independent but others like Ossetia should be deprived of it. From historical standpoint, it was the case in the former USSR that some nations held the status of 'republics' and in legal terms were equal to Russia (e.g. Georgia, Ukraine, etc.). However, others such as North Ossetia and South Ossetia were ‘autonomous republics’ within Russia and Georgia respectively. It was a system created by Joseph Stalin in the 1920s that persisted until the breakup of the Soviet Union. As a matter of fact, Abkhazia for instance, the other breakaway region of Georgia, had the status of a ‘republic’ for a brief period of time until Stalin subsequently reduced it to that of an autonomous republic within Georgia. What bewilders me is that many of the freedom and democracy loving people who probably abhor Stalin use Stalin's criterion of determining which nations have a right to form independent counties and which others do not. It is also good to note that this is the same federal structure that former Yugoslavia copied from the former USSR in the 1940s. Croatia and Slovenia, for instance, were ‘republics’ with a right to secede from Yugoslavia, while Kosovo was a part of Serbia with an autonomous status.

Source: georgi81