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Virtually everyone believes Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili foolishly provoked a Russian invasion on August 7, 2008, when he sent troops into the breakaway district of South Ossetia. “The warfare began Aug. 7 when Georgia launched a barrage targeting South Ossetia,” the Associated Press reported over the weekend in typical fashion. Virtually everyone is wrong. Georgia didn't start it on August 7, nor on any other date. The South Ossetian militia started it on August 6 when its fighters fired on Georgian peacekeepers and Georgian villages with weapons banned by the agreement hammered out between the two sides in 1994. At...

Can anyone control the forces the Russian president has unleashed? A couple of weeks back, while news readers were averting their gaze from photographs of a shirtless Vladimir Putin fishing in Siberia, two videos circulating on the Internet laid bare a different, much more chilling, portion of the Russian body politic. The first was a crude bit of agitprop thought to originate with the Nashi, a Kremlin-funded youth movement loyal to Putin whose work involves denouncing the president's critics as fascists, homosexuals or foreign-controlled traitors. The eight-minute clip, which eventually found its way to YouTube, was ostensibly meant to persuade...

FROM the day Alexander V. Litvinenko, a former K.G.B. officer, died of polonium poisoning in London last November, officials in Russia treated the investigation of his death as if it were simply a matter of bad public relations. They dismissed accusations of Russian involvement as nonsense fabricated by President Vladimir V. Putin’s enemies. Britain last week punctured Russia’s strategy. A decision by the Crown Prosecution Service to accuse another former K.G.B. officer of the murder and demand his extradition pushed Russia out of the international court of public opinion and into the international court of law. If recent history is...

Russian police today said they would crack down harshly on attempts to hold unauthorized opposition rallies planned for April 14 in Moscow and April 15 in St. Petersburg, RFE/RL's Russian Service reported. Metal police barricades have been erected on the central Moscow square where the March of Dissent is planned. Special police forces, the OMON, are being deployed to the capital. Yulia Malysheva, one of the march's organizers, told RFE/RL's Russian Service that large numbers of OMON officers have already been deployed to Moscow from other regions. She expressed concern, saying that "regional OMON as a rule do not bear...

Poland suggests Russia may have falsified documents in meat spat Published: November 25, 2006 WARSAW, Poland: Poland's justice minister suggested Saturday that Russia may have been behind forged documents accompanying Polish meat exports, the discovery of which led to a ban on Polish products. Zbigniew Ziobro said the documents appeared to have been falsified outside Poland by people accustomed to the Cyrillic alphabet. The Polish-Russian trade dispute has swelled into a larger standoff between Russia and the European Union. Russia claims that Poland tried to get substandard meat onto the Russian market using fake health documents. Poland agrees that the...

Poisoned Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko died on Thursday in an intensive care ward, London's University College Hospital said. Litvinenko, a fierce critic of the Russian government, suffered a rapid deterioration in his health on Thursday, but doctors still were unable to determine the cause of his death, a spokesman said in a statement.

The Government of the United States of America is waging an intense behind-the-scenes battle to stop the European Union lifting its 15-year-old arms embargo against China, warning The Blair government that it will not tolerate the prospect of European military technology being used to threaten its soldiers in the Far East. As Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, prepares to travel to Peking next week to discuss ending the arms ban, The Telegraph has learnt that the Bush administration is alarmed by Tony Blair's "cave-in" to French and German pressure. Japan has also expressed dismay over the EU's move dramatically to...