Setting aside the thorny question of legal sovereignty, here’s a thought that’s been percolating in my head over the past couple days: Does the lack of any local opposition, whether armed or otherwise, to the Russian military presence in Abkhazia and South Ossetia lend any legitimacy to the de facto disaggregation of the two breakawy provinces? Granted, Russian forces had already been there for over a decade as peacekeepers, and the “invasion” was not accompanied by regime change. But at a time when both American counterinsurgency doctrine and American diplomacy is increasingly engaging on the local level in Iraq and Afghanistan, why does the populace’s consent in the breakaway Geargian provinces carry no argumentative weight?
