And this has been supressed. The girl and aunt in the video were cut off and the segment pulled from the rebroadcast. Then it was censored from youtube for a while until people got it back up.
Posted by Teshi (Member # 5024) on :
Not "because they thought... Americans would back them up" necessarily. They want to assert their dominance in the breakaway parts of their country. Russia's reaction only helped to distract from their own actions.
But yes, it should not be forgotten that the Georgians attacked the de facto independent parts of their official territory first.
There was an article on the BBC about the media war between the US and Russia. I can't find it at the moment, but it was saying how America has been successful in using this hopefully brief conflict to drum up further condemnation of Russia- not that it's hard to do so.