This is from a new interview with David Satter on the International Affairs Forum:

The other thing
that I heard, and that I think is credible, is that they need time to
prepare a kind of pretext. It’s not a simple direct invasion of Georgia
without any pretext like the one that Saakashvili so generously
provided them for the first invasion. That would be difficult because
not only would it cast doubt on the legitimacy of the second invasion,
it would raise questions about the first one. Now, to prepare a real
pretext for invading Georgia, you need to put some work in. For the
first invasion, the preparations began months before the actual
crossing of the border. It might be the same in this case. I think for
the moment they don’t have the pretext that they need and I think that,
more than anything else, is what is restraining them.

But who knows? A trap has been set. Obama at the end of the day
will probably not cancel the deployment in Eastern Europe. The Russians
will claim that this is an aggressive action and that all of Obama’s
talk about a reset and his friendly gestures were just hot air and that
it just shows the duplicity of the United States. And the population,
which has limited access now to free information because of the control
over TV and everything else, will buy it. So we could be setting the
stage for an unpleasant confrontation. In that context, it would be
much easier for them to invade Georgia. Much easier to say, ‘we have to
act in our own defense because the West is turning against us’. So it’s
too early to be sanguine about the direction in which they are going.

All of this poses a threat not so much to the rest of the world as
to Russia itself. Russia has very deep problems, and to solve those
problems it really needs decent values and democratic practices. What
it has now is not going to do that. They have a leadership which comes
from the KGB which is totally corrupt. So we can only hope that the
Russian country, the Russian state, the Russian society will somehow
find a way to act in its own interest.

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