Barbelith Underground > Switchboard > The right to separate

This is a difficult question, I'm tempted to say that it depends on the region and its recent history but my honest answer is that I don't know.

What I do understand and find quite remarkable are the political manoeuvres being pulled by the Russian government. Putin is saying that "The suspicion arises that someone in the United States especially created this conflict with the aim of making the situation more tense and creating a competitive advantage for one of the candidates fighting for the post of US president". What a stretch of the imagination! There are only a handful of countries that could have such a high level politician make such a statement with a straight face. Difficult to make any kind of sense of the notion of independence when a region is politically sandwiched by the Russian and Georgian governments.