Turkey, Georgia, UAE bankroll Caucasus rebels

Image via Wikipedia

Created 02/01/2010 - 20:00

Militants in Russia's volatile North Caucasus region of Dagestan have received financing from supporters in Turkey, Georgia, Azerbaijan and the United Arab Emirates, television said Saturday, after a special operation yielded notebooks of expenses kept by rebels.

The notebooks seized during a special operation in Dagestan conducted by the Federal Security Service (FSB) on New Year's Eve show the rebels had received hefty donations from their foreign sponsors, national television said, airing footage from the press department of the Dagestan branch of FSB.

"Tens of millions of rubles came from the United Arab Emirates, Georgia, Turkey and Azerbajan," NTV channel said. Rossia television channel added that supporters from Saudi Arabia were also among the foreign sponsors.

Image via Wikipedia

"The sums are huge," Rossia channel said. "There was never any doubt anyway that militants in the North Caucasus have been generously bankrolled. But that generously...."

The notebooks show that rebels also extorted money from local businessmen and unscrupulous officials, television reports said.

"The money was distributed among various groups" in Dagestan and was used to finance purchases of arms, medicine and cars, they said.

The notebooks belonged to the leader of Dagestan's rebels, Umalat Magomedov also known by his nom de guerre as Al-Bara, television reports said, adding he was one of four rebels killed during the December 31 operation in the town of Khasavyurt.

"In spring, Al Qaeda's emissary in the Caucasus appointed Magomedov commander of the Dagestan front," Rossia channel said.

Authorities have also seized machine guns, grenade launchers and 45 cell phones containing rebels' phone numbers.

Authorities have long said that Islamist rebels receive financing from abroad.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev in August acknowledged "foreign" elements as a factor fomenting instability in the region, but stressed the root cause of the problem was within Russia itself, referring to corruption among law enforcement personnel.

Clashes between government forces and Islamist rebels are common in Dagestan.

Dagestan's neighbour Chechnya was the site of two bloody separatist wars after the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, and a low-level insurgency persists in the region despite the end of major hostilities.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Tolstoy Recalled Fondly in Chechen Museum (nytimes.com)
• Chechen president says the West wants to destroy Russia (telegraph.co.uk)
• Leading Ingush activist shot dead (news.bbc.co.uk)

Myth, Meth and the Georgian Invasion

By Alexander Cockburn

This article appeared in the August 31, 2009 edition of The Nation.

August 12, 2009

A year ago, Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili sent Georgian troops into South Ossetia on a murderous rampage, with civilian casualties put by Irina Gagloeva, the spokeswoman of South Ossetia, at 1,492. Much lower numbers have been offered by Western sources. Georgian soldiers butchered their victims with great brutality. Kirill Benediktov, in his online book on the invasion, reports that these soldiers were equipped--so subsequent searches of bodies and prisoners of war disclosed--not only with NATO-supplied food packages but with sachets of methamphetamine and combat stress pills based on MDMA, aka the active ingredient of Ecstasy. The meth amps up soldiers to kill without mercy, and the MDMA derivative frees them of subsequent debilitating flashbacks and recurring nightmares. Official use of methamphetamine and official testing of MDMA in the US armed forces have been discussed in news stories.

• Alexander Cockburn: Why is it easier to raise 3 million tweets for demonstrations in Iran than to twit about Obama's sellouts at home?

There was never any serious doubt that Saakashvili, with covert US encouragement and military training and kindred assistance, started the war. In June of this year, the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel ran a piece, seemingly based on a reading of a draft report by Heidi Tagliavini, who heads the European Union's fact-finding commission on the Georgian war. Despite the subsequent stentorian denials of a much-embarrassed Tagliavini, Der Spiegel's editors stood by their story: "The facts assembled on Tagliavini's desk refute Saakashvili's claim that his country became the innocent victim of 'Russian aggression' that day."

Large numbers of Russian tanks were nowhere near the border of South Ossetia on August 7, 2008. According to Tagliavini's draft report, as cited by Der Spiegel, "The experts found no evidence to support claims by the Georgian president that a Russian column of 150 tanks had advanced into South Ossetia on the evening of August 7. According to the commission's findings, the Russian army didn't enter South Ossetia until Aug. 8. Saakashvili had already amassed 12,000 troops and 75 tanks on the border with South Ossetia on the morning of Aug. 7." To avoid causing any embarrassment to the United States and its allies on the anniversary, the EU report was withheld and will be published in September, shorn--so staffers confided to Der Spiegel--of unpleasing disclosures. Two British monitors from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe corroborated Der Spiegel's and Russian accounts of Georgia having fired the first shots.

From the opening minutes of the five-day war, the BBC, CNN, Fox News and the other major networks bellowed in unison that this was a case of Russian aggression. Republican candidate John McCain, whose chief foreign policy adviser, Randy Scheunemann, was also a paid adviser of Saakashvili, ladled out vintage cold war rhetoric and proclaimed, "Today we are all Georgians." Candidate Obama was not quite so abandoned, at least in his initial reactions, prompting some to think--erroneously--that this particular Democrat might be more rational and pacific in his foreign policy. Voices of sanity in Congress were, as usual, almost inaudible. Representative Dana Rohrabacher was a spirited exception. "The Russians were right; we're wrong," he said. "The Georgians started it; the Russians ended it."

Here we are, a year later, the windowpanes still rattling from Joe Biden's speech to the Georgian Parliament on July 23--whether assisted by a combat envelope of methamphetamine we do not know--proclaiming, "We, the United States, stand by you on your journey to a secure, free and democratic, and once again united, Georgia." In other words, the United States remains implacably opposed to South Ossetia's desire for independence and committed to Georgian claims: "Divided, Georgia will not complete its journey. United, Georgia can achieve the dreams of your forebears and, maybe more importantly, the hopes of your children." Thus did Biden express US policy in linking hands across the decades with Stalin, who forced unwilling South Ossetia and Abkhazia into an enlarged Georgia.

Biden also told the Georgian Parliament that the United States would continue to help Georgia "modernize" its military and that Washington "fully supports" Georgia's aspiration to join NATO and would help Tbilisi meet the alliance's standards. This elicited a furious reaction from Moscow, pledging sanctions against any power rearming Georgia. The most nauseating moment in Biden's sortie to Tbilisi, where he repeatedly stressed he was a spokesman for Obama, came when, on accounts in the New York Times and Washington Post, he brazenly lied to schoolchildren, claiming Russia had launched the invasion. Not two weeks later, Assistant Secretary of State Philip Gordon repeated this lie in testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

We should note here that from Clinton-time forward, Georgia has been regarded by the United States as strategically vital in controlling the oil pipeline to Azerbaijan and Central Asia, bypassing Russia and Iran. Also, Georgia could play an enabling role if Israel decides to attack Iran's nuclear complex. The flight path from Israel to Iran is diplomatically and geographically challenging. And Georgia is perfectly situated as the takeoff point for any such raid. Israel has been heavily involved in supplying and training Georgia's armed forces. A story in Der Spiegel remarked that "Georgia had increasingly made headlines as a gold mine for Israeli arms dealers and veterans from the military and the Mossad, Israel's intelligence agency." President Saakashvili boasted that his defense minister, Davit Kezerashvili, and also Temur Iakobashvili, the minister responsible for negotiations over South Ossetia, lived in Israel before moving to Georgia, adding, "Both war and peace are in the hands of Israeli Jews."

In light of the foregoing, do you think McCain could have been worse, even as the war in Afghanistan escalates

About Alexander Cockburn

Alexander Cockburn has been The Nation's "Beat the Devil" columnist since 1984. He is the author or co-author of several books, including the best-selling collection of essays Corruptions of Empire (1987), and a contributor to many publications, from The New York Review of Books, Harper's Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly and the Wall Street Journal to alternative publications such as In These Times and the Anderson Valley Advertiser. With Jeffrey St. Clair, he edits the newsletter and radical website CounterPunch, which have a substantial world audience.

Hackers Stole IDs for Attacks

By SIOBHAN GORMAN

WASHINGTON -- Russian hackers hijacked American identities and U.S. software tools and used them in an attack on Georgian government Web sites during the war between Russia and Georgia last year, according to new research to be released Monday by a nonprofit U.S. group.

In addition to refashioning common Microsoft Corp. software into a cyber-weapon, hackers collaborated on popular U.S.-based social-networking sites, including Twitter and Facebook Inc., to coordinate attacks on Georgian sites, the U.S. Cyber Consequences Unit found. While the cyberattacks on Georgia were examined shortly after the events last year, these U.S. connections weren't previously known.

The research shows how cyber-warfare has outpaced military and international agreements, which don't take into account the possibility of American resources and civilian technology being turned into weapons.

Identity theft, social networking, and modifying commercial software are all common means of attack, but combining them elevates the attack method to a new level, said Amit Yoran, a former cybersecurity chief at the Department of Homeland Security. "Each one of these things by itself is not all that new, but this combines them in ways we just haven't seen before," said Mr. Yoran, now CEO of computer-security company NetWitness Corp.

The five-day Russian-Georgian conflict in August 2008 left hundreds of people dead, crushed Georgia's army, and left two parts of its territory on the border with Russia -- Abkhazia and South Ossetia -- under Russian occupation.

The cyberattacks in August 2008 significantly disrupted Georgia's communications capabilities, disabling 20 Web sites for more than a week. Among the sites taken down last year were those of the Georgian president and defense minister, as well as the National Bank of Georgia and major news outlets.

Taking out communications systems at the onset of an attack is standard military practice, said John Bumgarner, chief technical officer at the USCCU and a former cyber-sleuth at the National Security Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency.

The USCCU assesses the economic and national-security implications of cybersecurity threats and briefs top U.S. officials, officials in key industries and international institutions.

"U.S. corporations and U.S. citizens need to understand that they can become pawns in a global cyberwar," said Mr. Bumgarner, who wrote the report.

The White House completed a review of cybersecurity policy in April. Among the issues Obama administration officials are now studying is how laws of war and international obligations need to be reworked to account for cyberattacks.

Homeland Security department spokeswoman Amy Kudwa said she couldn't comment on a report that she hadn't seen and hadn't been released yet.

Last year was the first time such cyberattacks were known to have coincided with a military campaign.

The Georgian attacks, according to the group's findings, were perpetrated by Russian criminal groups and had no clear link to the Russian government. However, the timing of the attacks, just hours after the Russian military incursion began, suggests the Russian government may have at least indirectly coordinated with the cyberattackers, Mr. Bumgarner's report concluded.

"Russian officials and the Russian military had nothing to do with the cyberattacks on the Georgian Web sites last year," said Yevgeniy Khorishko, a spokesman at the Russian Embassy in Washington.

The USCCU plans to release a nine-page report on the attacks to the public on Monday.

Mr. Bumgarner traced the attacks back to 10 Web sites registered in Russia and Turkey. Nine of the sites were registered using identification and credit-card information stolen from Americans; one site was registered with information stolen from a person in France.

The 10 sites were used to coordinate the "botnet" attacks, which harnessed the power of thousands of computers around the world to disable the Georgian government sites as well as those of large Georgian banks and media outlets. The botnet attack commandeered thousands of other computers and instructed them to try to access the target Web sites all at once, overwhelming them.

The Russian and Turkish computer servers used in the attacks had been previously used by cybercriminal organizations, according to the USCCU.

Early reports last year pinned the attacks on the cyber equivalent of the Russian mafia, known as the "Russian Business Network." Mr. Bumgarner said it wasn't possible to connect the attacks directly to that group. Security experts disagree on whether the group still exists.

Some of the software used to carry out the attacks was a modified version of Microsoft code commonly used by network administrators to test their computer systems, Mr. Bumgarner found. The code remains freely available on Microsoft's Web site, he said, declining to name it.

A Microsoft spokesman declined to comment on the finding because he hadn't seen the report.

Once the botnet attacks had launched, Mr. Bumgarner said, other would-be attackers noticed them and started to collaborate on various Web forums, including Twitter and Facebook.

Mr. Bumgarner used data-mining tools to review Facebook pages (which some people don't keep private) and Twitter for certain Russian words that indicated they were likely involved in the attack. He saw users on those sites and others swapping attack code and target lists, and encouraging others to join.

"It's a difficult problem to handle," said Facebook spokesman Barry Schnitt, because it is impossible to detect such collaboration without monitoring conversations. Facebook has mechanisms to verify user identities and users can report inappropriate activities on the site, he said, but it doesn't monitor communications of its users.

Twitter didn't respond to requests to comment.

—Jessica E. Vascellaro contributed to this article.

Write to Siobhan Gorman at siobhan.gorman@wsj.com

Russia to Build Military Base in Breakaway Georgian Region of Abkhazia of Georgia

By Philip P. Pan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, August 13, 2009

MOSCOW, Aug. 12 -- Prime Minister Vladimir Putin traveled to the breakaway Georgian region of Abkhazia on Wednesday and pledged to strengthen Russia's military presence there, defying U.S. and European objections amid simmering tensions in the region.

Speaking on the anniversary of his nation's victory over Georgia in a five-day war last year, Putin said the Kremlin planned to spend nearly $500 million to build a base in the separatist enclave and reinforce its de facto border with Georgia.

"It won't be a Maginot line," Putin said, referring to the fortifications France built against Germany before World War II.

His remarks and appearance in Abkhazia underscored Russia's growing foothold in what once was Georgian territory and highlighted the sharp differences that remain between Moscow and Washington despite the Obama administration's efforts to "reset" bilateral relations.

U.S. and European officials have called on Russia to comply with the cease-fire agreement that ended the war and withdraw its troops to prewar positions and levels. But Russia says it is no longer bound by those promises because it recognized Abkhazia and another breakaway region, South Ossetia, as independent states after the war.

It is unclear how many Russian soldiers remain in the disputed territories, where Moscow has stationed troops since the post-Soviet conflicts of the 1990s. But the military said in June that plans to double its prewar presence to nearly 7,500 troops had been scaled back. Instead, officials said more Russian border guards would be deployed.

Russian forces are stationed at two bases, one in the South Ossetian capital of Tskhinvali and the other in Gudauta, a town on the Black Sea coast in western Abkhazia. The Gudauta base was built during the Soviet era and is considered a strategic asset because it boasts one of the largest military airfields in the Caucasus.

Russia and Abkhazia have been haggling over Gudauta for months, with the Abkhaz seeking to get more from Russia in return for use of the base. It was not clear whether Putin had succeeded in breaking a deadlock in talks over a formal treaty on the subject.

Some Abkhaz are said to be wary of growing too dependent on Russia, but the authorities greeted Putin warmly as he arrived by helicopter in the local capital of Sukhumi. The visit came a month after U.S. and European officials criticized Russian President Dmitry Medvedev for making a similar appearance in South Ossetia.

The Georgian Foreign Ministry issued a statement denouncing Putin's visit, calling it "yet another provocation carried out quite in the tradition of Soviet special services."

In an interview with Abkhaz reporters broadcast in Russia, Putin chastised the West for condemning the Russian invasion of Georgia, which he has long argued was required to protect South Ossetia from a Georgian attack.

"That's not even double standards, not even triple standards. It's a complete lack of any standards," he said, accusing the United States of pressuring countries to continue supporting Georgia's claim to the territories.

Asked about the possibility of another war, Putin replied: "Given the Georgian leadership today, nothing can be ruled out, but it will be much harder for them to do it."

The Obama administration has repeatedly endorsed Georgia's territorial integrity, and only Nicaragua has joined Russia in recognizing the sovereignty of the separatist regions.

Special correspondent Sarah Marcus in Tbilisi, Georgia, contributed to this report.

Refugees From Russia-Georgia Conflict Might Never Go Home

By Sarah Marcus
Special to The Washington Post
Tuesday, August 11, 2009

TSEROVANI, Georgia -- Just off the highway between the Georgian capital, Tbilisi, and the city of Gori, epicenter of last year's war with Russia, lies this settlement of single-story, boxlike houses stretching toward the foothills of the Caucasus Mountains.

As Georgia marked the anniversary of the war this weekend with ceremonies and speeches, the internal refugees living here continued their daily struggle with the fallout of the fighting -- gathering in clusters to wait for humanitarian aid, searching in vain for jobs and managing the bittersweet memories of their lives before the conflict.

"I never expected this would happen," said Marina Dzhokhadze, 50, sitting in her basic, sparsely furnished home and describing how she had been forced to leave the South Ossetian village of Kemerti a year ago. "I am afraid that it will happen all over again. I pray that God will preserve us from another war."

Dzhokhadze is one of an estimated 30,000 people, mostly ethnic Georgians, who have been unable to return to their homes in the breakaway region of South Ossetia and the nearby area of Akhalgori, which was under Georgian control before the war but is now occupied by Russian forces.

Like many others, Dzhokhadze and her family, though not wealthy, enjoyed a comfortable existence in South Ossetia as farmers on fertile land. Now they struggle to make ends meet.

In an address to the country Friday night, Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili paid tribute to internal refugees like Dzhokhadze and vowed to reunite the nation not by war but by "peacefully strengthening our democratic institutions, by constantly developing our economy."

A neatly lined collection of bright green and whitewashed houses, Tserovani is the largest of 36 settlements established by the Georgian government. The authorities won praise last year for quickly building the settlements before the onset of winter.

But today, the limits of the settlements are obvious. Almost all are located far from jobs that might be found in urban areas, while the houses sit on small plots that are all but useless for commercial farming.

As difficult as life is for residents in Tserovani, they at least live in structures that don't leak and are equipped with indoor toilets and running water. In other settlements, the houses are damp and as many as eight families share a tap.

"The living conditions are really bad here," said Neli Peruashvili, 53, a Georgian woman who fled her bomb-damaged house in the Ossetian village of Eredvi and now lives in a nearby settlement named Shavshebi. "We have no money. The water in the taps is too dirty to drink so the men have to bring clean water from the next village by hand."

In a nation suffering the effects both of war and the global financial crisis, most displaced by the fighting survive on humanitarian aid and monthly government subsidies of $16 per person because there are few jobs available. They joined a previous wave of more than 200,000 internal refugees from South Ossetia and the Black Sea region of Abkhazia who fled during the separatist wars fought in the 1990s after Georgia gained independence from the Soviet Union.

The Georgians who fled South Ossetia are coming to grips with the reality that they may never be able to return to homes and farmlands that they struggled for years to accumulate. The ethnic Ossetians, many of whom are married to Georgians, wonder when they will be able to see the relatives they left behind.

The South Ossetian authorities have made clear that Georgians who left are not welcome to return. But many of the estimated 6,800 people who fled homes in the Akhalgori region have been allowed to go back. Most, however, have been too frightened to stay for long.

"There is little security there. There are tanks in the streets, and if you speak Georgian, the Ossetians and Russians there dislike you," said Irma Basilashvili, 24, who fled the region in the days after the war as Ossetian militias looted homes and rumors of rape and other violence against Georgians circulated.

Though Russia signed a cease-fire pledging to withdraw troops to prewar positions and strengths, it has boosted its military presence in South Ossetia and refused to surrender Akhalgori. Russia says it is no longer bound by those promises because it has recognized South Ossetia as an independent state and Akhalgori as part of South Ossetia.

Addressing troops at a base not far from the Georgian border, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said Saturday that Moscow would never withdraw its recognition of South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

"Some of our partners have an illusion that it's a temporary thing, some kind of maneuvering," he said. "Such decisions are made once and for all, and there is no way back."

Over the past week, Georgia and South Ossetia have traded accusations of mortar fire and shootings. Since the end of the war, nine civilians and 11 police officers have been killed in Georgian border areas, according to the Georgian government.

Some residents said they felt caught in a never-ending cycle of conflict.

Khatuna Kasradze, 39, first fled Tskhinvali, the South Ossetian capital, for the village of Ergneti during fighting between Ossetian and Georgian forces in the early 1990s. But then her new home was burned down by Ossetian militia in last year's war.

"Just as life was starting to improve a little bit, everything began again," she said, sitting in a small cottage she built with United Nations and European Union aid next to the ruined shell of her former house. "I don't think the situation will ever normalize."

Professor Main Target of Assault on Twitter

By JENNA WORTHAM and ANDREW E. KRAMER

The cyberattacks Thursday and Friday on Twitter and other popular Web services disrupted the lives of hundreds of millions of Internet users, but the principal target appeared to be one man: a 34-year-old economics professor from the republic of Georgia.

During the assault — the latest eruption in a yearlong skirmish between nationalistic hackers in Russia and Georgia — unidentified attackers sent millions of spam e-mail messages and bombarded Twitter, Facebook and other services with junk messages. The blitz was an attempt to block the professor’s Web pages, where he was revisiting the events leading up to the brief territorial war between Russia and Georgia that began a year ago.

The attacks were “the equivalent of bombing a TV station because you don’t like one of the newscasters,” Mikko Hyppönen, chief research officer of the Internet security firm F-Secure, said in a blog post. “The amount of collateral damage is huge. Millions of users of Twitter, LiveJournal and Facebook have been experiencing problems because of this attack.”

The blogger, a refugee from the Abkhazia region, a territory on the Black Sea disputed between Russia and Georgia, writes under the name Cyxymu, but identified himself only by the name Giorgi in a telephone interview. Giorgi, who said he taught at Sukhumi State University, first noticed Thursday afternoon that LiveJournal, a popular blogging platform, was not working for him. “I decided to go to Facebook,” he said. “And Facebook didn’t work. Then I went to Twitter, and Twitter didn’t work. ‘How strange,’ I thought, ‘What a coincidence they all don’t work at once.’ ”

Security experts say that it is nearly impossible to determine who exactly is behind the attack, which disrupted access to Twitter, Facebook, LiveJournal and some Google sites on Thursday and continued to affect many Twitter users into Friday evening.

But Beth Jones, an analyst with the Internet security firm Sophos, said the assault occurred in two stages.

Early Thursday, the attackers sent out a wave of spam under the name Cyxymu, which is a Latin transliteration of the Cyrillic name of the capital of Abkhazia, Sukhumi. This technique, a “joe job,” is intended to discredit a Web user by making him appear to be the source of a large amount of junk e-mail. “These hackers wanted to make him look responsible for millions of spam e-mails,” said Ms. Jones.

The messages contained links to Giorgi’s accounts on several social networks and Web sites, including Twitter.

The next leg of the attack, Ms. Jones said, was a distributed denial of service, or D.D.O.S., attack aimed at knocking Giorgi off the Web. The hackers used a botnet, a network of thousands of malware-infected personal computers, to direct huge amounts of junk traffic to Cyxymu’s pages on Twitter, LiveJournal, YouTube and Facebook in an attempt to disable them, Ms. Jones said.

The junk messages overwhelmed the services, slowing them, and in the case of Twitter and LiveJournal, shutting them down entirely for a time.

Giorgi said his pages were providing a place for refugees from Abkhazia to exchange memories of their home. The Twitter page had a sepia photograph of a palm-lined city street. “It was nostalgia,” he said.

This week, he began posting day-by-day accounts of the run-up to the conflict that drew partly on posts from his readers inside of Abkhazia, who he said had been describing how the Russian army staged its forces in the region in early August 2008.

“I feel a bit ashamed for the people who lost service because my blog was blocked,” said Giorgi.

The hundreds of millions of Internet users affected were simply “collateral damage,” said Ms. Jones.

The attacks and their aftermath show just how vital Web tools and services are becoming to political discourse — and how vulnerable they are to disruption.

“They aren’t set up to play the role of a global communications network, but very quickly they’ve come to represent that,” said John Palfrey, a law professor and co-director of Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

The attacks that felled Twitter shed light on the fragility of the popular microblogging service, especially compared to its competitor Facebook, which quickly recovered from the pummeling, said Stefan Tanase, a researcher at Kaspersky Lab, an Internet security firm. Twitter, a small San Francisco company, has been struggling to improve its security even as it tries to manage hypergrowth in the number of users and messages it handles.

But, Mr. Tanase said, “Twitter is definitely a company that is learning fast and reacting fast.”

The outage frustrated many Twitter users. Some migrated over to better-functioning social networks like Facebook and FriendFeed to send messages and follow conversations, said Jeremiah Owyang, an analyst at Forrester Research and a prolific tweeter.

“If Twitter goes down or shuts down permanently, the conversation just shifts somewhere else,” he said.

For others, solving the problem wasn’t quite as simple.

Soren Macbeth, founder and chief executive of StockTwits, a service that lets investors trade news and information about companies, said his service, which is built on Twitter’s infrastructure, was offline Thursday and still hadn’t fully recovered Friday.

“Having the service be intermittent is almost worse than having it be totally down,” he said. “It makes it seem more like our issue, a problem with our service.”

Mr. Macbeth said the service, which receives as many as 10,000 postings a day, had been at Twitter’s mercy since its inception. “It’s very challenging to run a business on top of Twitter,” he said. The difficulties of working with Twitter had already prompted StockTwits to begin developing a stand-alone platform, which the company plans to introduce on Sept. 1.

But for most businesses, Twitter is merely a supplemental marketing tool.

Ben Van Leeuwen, who runs trucks that serve scoops of ice cream to customers around New York City, said he didn’t even notice the service was down. “Sales were the same yesterday as they were the day before,” he said.

Aaron Magness, who heads up new business development and marketing at Zappos.com, an online shoe retailer with a sizable following on Twitter, said in an e-mail message that the outage didn’t affect the company.

“Twitter is one of many communication tools we utilize,” he said. “Luckily, we love talking to our customers and Twitter going down doesn’t impact our phones."

Russia's Maneuvers in Caucasus Highlight Volatility of Region

By Sarah Marcus
Special to The Washington Post
Sunday, June 28, 2009

TBILISI, Georgia -- Military helicopters circled once again over Georgia's mountainous terrain. Amid the crackle of gunfire, soldiers ran across battlefields carrying comrades on stretchers. But this was no repeat of last summer's brief war with Russia. It was a training exercise -- and this time, NATO sent help.

The month-long exercises, which concluded June 3 and involved more than 1,000 soldiers from 14 countries, took place near Georgia's border with the breakaway territory of South Ossetia and were condemned by the Russian government as a "provocation."

Now the Kremlin is preparing to stage its own military maneuvers in the Caucasus region. Russia's top commander, Gen. Nikolai Makarov, has said the "large-scale exercises" will involve "all the brigades of the North Caucasus Military District, the Black Sea Fleet and Caspian Flotilla marine brigades."

Makarov will personally oversee the operation, dubbed Kavkaz-2009, according to Russian state media. The exercises are set to begin Monday and end July 6, just as President Obama is scheduled to arrive in Moscow on his first state visit.

The two sets of war games are a reminder of the volatility of the region more than 10 months after Russian troops routed the Georgian army in a five-day war. The Russian exercises will go forward as two international monitoring missions are withdrawing from the area and as Russian forces continue to occupy territory that a year ago was uncontested Georgian soil.

A team of observers from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe is scheduled to leave Georgia at the end of the month at Russia's insistence, and Moscow used its veto in the U.N. Security Council last week to terminate the U.N. mission in the other breakaway Georgian territory, Abkhazia.

A third group of monitors from the European Union remains in Georgia but has been denied access to the two territories, which Russia recognized as independent countries after last year's war.

Pavel Felgengauer, a Moscow-based military analyst who writes for the opposition Novaya Gazeta newspaper, warned that Russia may be preparing for another war, in part to establish a corridor through Georgia to an important Russian base in Armenia.

He noted that similar Russian exercises in the North Caucasus preceded last year's war. "Such exercises are traditionally used as a cover under which to prepare troops for war," he said. "They could easily lead to deployment of troops."

The Georgian government's response to the Russian exercises has been muted. But Defense Minister Vasil Sikharulidze traveled to Washington this month to urge the Obama administration to strengthen military cooperation with Georgia. Speaking to the Associated Press, he warned that Russian troops were "better prepared for war than they were last year."

In a recent interview, Sikharulidze added that Georgia was working with the United States to upgrade its armed forces. "If you compare Russian and Georgian military organization, there is a huge disbalance," he said. "But the Georgian army is trained, and being trained, to deter and delay Russian aggression."

Sikharulidze said the army began a new training cycle, focused on defense, in January. But he said the United States has not supplied antitank and antiaircraft weapons that Georgia has sought.

Russian officials, meanwhile, insist that Georgia is already better armed than it was before the war. They have accused E.U. monitors of ignoring the buildup and Georgia of preparing to seize the territories by force.

About 8,500 troops will participate in the upcoming exercises, according to the Russian Defense Ministry, though statements by Makarov and others suggest much larger maneuvers. Officials have said the exercises will incorporate lessons from the Georgian war but focus on counterterrorism operations.

NATO officials said the alliance's peacekeeping and crisis-response exercises in Georgia were scheduled long before last year's war and were not targeted at Russia. But the decision to proceed despite Russian objections was seen as an achievement by the Georgian government.

"It was very important to have a message that the principle of sovereignty is an important thing for NATO and [that] no country can just veto a decision from outside," said Deputy Foreign Minister Giga Bokeria.

NATO support appears more important than ever to this former Soviet republic, yet Georgia's prospects for joining the alliance have faded amid U.S. efforts to improve relations with Russia and lingering concerns about the judgment of President Mikheil Saakashvili, whom some blame for provoking last year's war.

NATO has pledged to bring Georgia into the alliance, but it rejected Georgia's request for a clear timetable for membership and instead set up an annual process for reviewing the country's progress toward alliance requirements.

The decision, and the departure of the Bush administration, have heightened anxiety in Georgia about whether Washington will continue to back it against its powerful neighbor.

The U.S. assistant secretary of state for the region, Philip H. Gordon, traveled to Tbilisi this month and reaffirmed a partnership agreement signed by the Bush administration. And in April, Obama stood firm on Georgia in a London meeting with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, referring to the war as "the Russian invasion of Georgia" in a news conference.

Saakashvili, a favorite of the Bush administration, said Obama's use of the phrase amounted to an endorsement of Georgia's view of the war.

Russia maintains that it invaded Georgia only after Georgian forces attacked South Ossetia, killing Russian peacekeepers and civilians. Saakashvili says he ordered the assault in response to shelling by South Ossetian rebels and an imminent Russian invasion.

Richard Giragosian, director of the Armenian Center for National and International Studies, said U.S. policy toward Georgia has shifted, official statements of support notwithstanding.

While the Pentagon is continuing to work with the Georgian army, he said, the emphasis now is on "assistance and training limited to a defense nature only."

Lincoln Mitchell, a scholar at Columbia University who studies Georgia, said the Obama administration may be reluctant to provide arms to Georgia because of Saakashvili's domestic policies. A fractured opposition has portrayed him as an autocrat and staged weeks of protests demanding he resign.

But Bokeria, the deputy foreign minister, defended Georgia's democratic credentials, calling them "an important factor" in U.S. support for the country. "This factor is not hampering the assistance," he said.