What do you think should happen to South Ossetia?
| Remain in the composition of Georgia | 4% |
| Become part of Russia | 46% |
| Become an independent state | 34% |
| Hard to answer | 16% |
Source: Yury Levada Analytical Center
Methodology: Interviews with 1,600 Russian adults, conducted from Aug. 9 and Aug. 10, 2008. No margin of error was provided.
Grouped together, there are 10 separate pockets of frozen conflicts straddling both sides of the Russian border in the Caucuses. But the Russian campaign to maintain external influence stretches far beyond the troubled network of clans and tribes of the Caucasian mountains.
Along with South Ossetia and Abkhazia in Georgia, there is Crimea in the Ukraine, Transdniester in Moldova, Narva in Estonia, and eastern areas of Latvia.
—Telegraph
Russia battled Georgian forces on land and sea, reports said late Sunday, despite a Georgian cease-fire offer and its claim to be withdrawing from South Ossetia, the separatist Georgian province battered by days of intense fighting.
Russia claimed to have sunk a Georgian boat that was trying to attack Russian vessels in the Black Sea, and Georgian officials said Russia sent tanks from South Ossetia into Georgia proper, heading toward a strategic city before being turned back.
—My Way News
Russia expanded its attacks on Georgia on Sunday, moving tanks and troops through the separatist enclave of South Ossetia and advancing toward the city of Gori in central Georgia, in its first direct assault on a Georgian city with ground forces during three days of heavy fighting, Georgian officials said.
The maneuver — along with bombing of the Georgian capital, Tbilisi — seemed to suggest that Russia’s aims in the conflict had gone beyond securing the pro-Russian enclaves of South Ossetia and Abkhazia to weakening the armed forces of Georgia, a former Soviet republic and an ally of the United States whose Western leanings have long irritated the Kremlin.
—New York Times
Georgia said on Friday its forces were in control of the capital of the breakaway region of South Ossetia, but rebels said Russian armored vehicles had entered the northern edges of the city."Tskhinvali and the heights around Tskhinvali and the majority of the villages in South Ossetia are under the control of Georgian forces," Georgia's pro-Western President Mikheil Saakashvili said in a televised address.
