Tbilisi/Moscow  - Georgia was hailed by the West as a beacon of democracy and growth in the Caucasus. It had the third largest contingent of troops in Iraq and seemed on a steady track for NATO membership - before its war with Russia.

Tbilisi/Moscow - Four months after the war it lost to Russia, the Georgian Parliament Thursday charged that the government as well as the military had made serious mistakes in the South Ossetian conflict.

In a report released late in the evening in the Georgian capital, the special commission also blamed Russia as the party which pushed the level of conflict to open warfare, according to media reports in Tbilisi.

The report also charged that the Georgian government, despite having good intelligence, was badly prepared for the war over the renegade areas of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. It said the war was waged without agreement within the cabinet.

Geneva - Agreement was reached Thursday to allow humanitarian aid workers and assistance to reach some of the most vulnerable refugees from the Russian-Georgian war this past summer, senior diplomats said.

While the agreement said the sides would strive to let the aid into areas within South Ossetia and Abkhazia to aid internally displaced people there before the end of the year, no rigid timeline was agreed upon, the negotiators told dpa.

Tbilisi  - "Georgia would have to be crazy to go to war with Russia, and we are not crazy," President Mikheil Saakashvili told a reporter from Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa in a May interview.

Saakashvili's analysis - the first half of it at least - was certainly proven accurate by August's South Ossetia War. Russia's army demolished Georgia in a lightning campaign, as the biggest gamble of the Georgian leader's life came up a bust.

The South Ossetians and Georgians had fought once before, in 1991. By the summer of 2008, Saakashvili and the Kremlin were in open conflict over control of South Ossetia, a renegade Georgian province boasting de facto independence with its government defying Tbilisi's right even to set foot in the region.

Tbilisi/Kiev  - The Russo-Georgian War in August of this year demonstrated a basic truth about the Russian army: it is a sledgehammer, not a rapier, and a fairly effective sledgehammer at that.

The five-day conflict left few doubts that, when it came to high tech and training, Russia's fighting men are behind modern armed forces. Western experts routinely pointed out during the conflict how antiquated some parts of the Russian military are.

However, the well-orchestrated, lightning invasion also made clear that the Kremlin's soldiers are more than capable of using ingenuity and overwhelming numbers to crush an opponent like the Georgian military.

Tbilisi/Moscow  - Unarmed observers of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) were fired at in the buffer zone near the breakaway republic of South Ossetia on Wednesday, Georgian television reported.

The television channel Rustavi-2 showed images of an off-road vehicle belonging to the OSCE with several bullet holes in the side.

A spokeswoman for the OSCE confirmed the incident which she said took place near the city of Gori. Nobody was wounded.