Word: saakashvili
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Georgia, President Mikheil Saakashvili, once considered a champion of democracy in the region, has seen his stature fall at home and abroad since the conflict. However, street protests in April failed to topple him, and he still has friends in high places: the Obama Administration. Vice President Joe Biden visited Tbilisi in July and pledged continued U.S. support for efforts by Georgia and Ukraine to break free of Russia's orbit. (See pictures of Joe Biden...
...troops out of South Ossetia and into central Georgia. During the war, international human-rights groups accused Georgia of indiscriminately shelling civilian areas and Russia of allowing the ethnic cleansing of Georgian villages in South Ossetia. Though the fighting failed to topple the ailing presidency of Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, one of the Kremlin's archenemies, his power inside the country was weakened. Street protests against him have only recently come to an end. The war also strained Russia's relations with the West - relations that U.S. President Barack Obama was trying to reset on his recent visit to Moscow...
...ruled out rearming Georgia, whose military was crushed during its brief war with Russia last August. The possibility of such a deal, or even the discussion of it, puts the Obama Administration in a difficult position, forced to choose between a reset of relations with Russia or indulging Saakashvili's request. "It is a huge political mistake to support Saakashvili. By giving him weapons, the U.S. would be putting guns in the hands of a criminal," Sergei Markov, a Duma deputy and one of the chief ideologists of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's United Russia Party, told TIME...
...pinned to any timetable. The Obama Administration wants to be able to say that it supports Georgia's goal, safe in the knowledge that the Europeans, who blocked it even when Bush pushed hard, will not allow it to happen. The Western European NATO countries see Saakashvili as unstable and impetuous, and blame him for presenting Moscow with a pretext for its military humbling of Georgia...
...that better U.S. relations with Moscow could benefit their countries. "The more substantive relationship we have with Moscow, the more we can defuse the zero-sum thinking about our relations with Russia's neighbors," he said during a speech in Kiev. He also called on Yushchenko and Georgia's Saakashvili to heal rifts with their respective opposition parties and upbraided Ukraine and Georgia for the political infighting that has slowed reform...