Georgia's actions in Ossetia could have been portrayed as genocide if our army hadn't intervened. And we intervened, succumbing to an obvious provocation. And it's also unclear whether the Georgians were shelling civilians or not; it could be another instance of disinformation. I'm not defending Georgia, nor am I saying that we are to blame; BOTH sides are to blame. Russia could have threatened them with the same missiles, and that threat alone would have been enough to shut Saakashvili up immediately, but we decided to deploy troops. Why doesn't Georgia want to grant Ossetia independence? Well, think about it: did we grant Chechnya independence at one point? That's all there is to it. No one wants to lose a piece of their own pie. And granting Russian citizenship to the residents of South Ossetia was also a major provocation at the time, but the Georgians didn't fall for it, notice. Hold democratic elections in Georgia? Ha, guys, do you think we had democratic elections? Look for yourselves: Yeltsin may have been elected (I can't say for sure – I was just a kid back then and didn't follow the country's affairs at all), but after that, we elect those whom the current president points to. Yeltsin proposed Putin, so we elected Putin. Putin proposed Medvedev, so we elected Medvedev. And all of this with a huge margin in the votes. I don't quite believe that the elections were fair, so it's unlikely that we would hold democratic elections in Georgia in the event of a forced change of government. Well, that's a digression from the topic.