During the lull between meetings this morning....

Want to get back to what I'm sure will be the main focus of the blog for the immediate future, Russia and its relationship with the West.

Yulia Latynina, arguably the one Russian journalist most capable of picking up the mantle left by Anna Politkovskaya, has an excellent op-ed in The Moscow Times about what most in the Russian press are dubbing The Olympics War. There's an implicit message in it that the "blame game" over who started the war is utterly trivial: Sakaashvili's decision to send troops into South Ossetia was a colossal mistake, a tragic underestimation of Russia's response and a naive reliance upon American support. This is the kind of middle of the road take she's espoused countless times over the past week on her radio show on Ekho Moskvy. I don't have direct sources, so you'll have to take me on faith, but there are very few people in the Russian media - even the decimated "liberal" stations and those journalists who aren't government apologists - who are taking a similar stance; very few who are willing to admit the tragedy of it. Most journalists of this ilk are simply astonished by Sakaashvili's idiotic decision to invade and very few of them want to be aligned with Putin so they're taking the equally ridiculous position that the invasion of Georgia is on par with the invasions committed by atrocious men from the last century with ridiculous mustaches.

I don't know why there are so few people who are capable of sensing that the tragedy of this war was that it was so completely unavoidable, there's nobody to single out for blame, just a number of poorly thought out, easy to ridicule decisions.