Russia is obviously now making its move against NATO expansion and has plans to show the nations around them that this NATO tiger will not venture out of its cage. The invasion of Georgia was well planned by Russia in advance. Russia simply could not have moved this quickly otherwise.

It looks to me like Russia was behind the unrest knowing that the Georgian President would have to react. When he did Russia started putting their expansion plans into motion. The main objective is not Georgia it is first reasserting itself in the former USSR states that have a Russian speaking population. They also intend to stop NATO expansion and to counter U.S. influence in what they believe to be their Russian Empire. The major immediate threat probably always was and now is to the Ukraine.

After Russia controls the Russian speaking areas she will expand elsewhere and form alliances with nations like Serbia and Iran. The Gog of Ezekiel is now rising to control this region of the world. NATO will do nothing but bluster and provide arms for any resistance. Old Europe and the U.S. are not going to risk their own necks for Eastern Europe. Those nations in Eastern Europe that are joining NATO and the EU thinking that the West will fight Russia for them are living under a very false hope.

Bloomberg.com: Worldwide

Aug. 13 (Bloomberg) — Now that Russia has humiliated Georgia with a punishing military offensive, it may shift its attention to reining in pro-Western Ukraine, another American ally in the former Soviet Union.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s first order of business likely will be to try to thwart Ukraine’s bid to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

Medvedev, 42, and Putin, 56, say Russia began the offensive in response to a drive by Georgia to restore control over the breakaway region of South Ossetia. Now Russia has ousted Georgian forces from there and from Abkhazia, another separatist region, and destroyed much of the central government’s military.

Russia may find it convenient to raise the level of tension with Ukraine in the run-up to the December NATO review,” Citigroup Inc.’s London-based David Lubin and Ali Al-Eyd wrote in a note to clients. “If the conflict with Russia decelerates or reverses Georgia’s integration with the West, a similar fate could also affect Ukraine.”

Divided Country

Ukraine, a country of 46 million people that’s almost as big as France, has a large Russian-speaking population in the south and east that opposes NATO entry and looks to Moscow. Russian officials warn that if President Viktor Yushchenko pushes Ukraine into NATO, the nation may split in two.

A month ago, about 1,000 U.S. soldiers joined 600 Georgians and 100 from Ukraine, Azerbaijan and Armenia in joint exercises at the Vaziani military base near Tbilisi. Russia repeatedly bombed the base during this month’s war.

“The American role in the region has been weakened,” Jan Techau, a European and security affairs analyst at the German Council on Foreign Relations in Berlin, said in a telephone interview. “It’s a reassertion of Russia’s dominant role in the region.”

It’s somewhat reminiscent, in 1939, when Stalin attacked Finland,” former U.S. national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski told Bloomberg Television. “I think this kind of confrontation is the best kind of answer as to why they are seeking to be members of NATO.”