>http://www.opendemocracy.net/democracy-caucasus/south_ossetia_4100.jsp
>
>It appears that at that time, the international community (Nato, U.S., etc) did not recognize Ossetia. I couldn't quickly find anything that showed whether or not anything has changed since then.

OK, Deutsche Welle used to be a propaganda spouting outlet of the cold war, not a toothpick's width better than RFA and VOA, but it seems that the new times have forced them into... journalism. They have a lot of articles on the subject, and I have even read a few. It's surprising and quite refreshing to hear anything but NPR's week of ceaseless "we just hate Russia and won't let anything be heard about them unless it's bad". It doesn't matter that Saakashvili is running a despoty, that he had his own court martial regime for a while just recently, none of that matters, he's the darling of the west and he can kill any number of people he wants. He's probably responsible for at least a (few?) thousand dead and some flattened villages, but he's still advertised as the defender of the free world (aka pipeline) against the big bear.

So, for the uninitiated, a simple article from a very unlikely source (for me - I've heard some stuff from DW over the decades and absolutely hated the lying bastards for their dirty propaganda): http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,2144,3557984,00.html