The long awaited EU-fact finding mission report lead by the Swiss diplomat Heidi Tagliavini on the August war appeared on September 30th, 2009. The goal of the mission was to ‘investigate the origins and the course of the conflict in Georgia’. It is concluded that although Georgia started the attack on Tskhinvali, South Ossetia, both parties Georgia and Russia are to blame for the buildup of tension. Russia is blamed for using military force to reshape borders, something which had become almost unthinkable in post-WWII Europe, and for using disproportional force at that. The report came to focus on the human tragedy involved. About 850 lost their lives; many more were wounded and about 100,000 people had to flee their homes. The majority of these has been able to return in the meantime, but between 10,000 and 35,000 thousand people remain displaced.

There are many diff erent ways in which the war can be framed, from a local perspective of the diff erent parties involved and what the war is coming to mean in ‘the West’. Was it an expression of nineteenth-century Russian ‘empire mentality’, a come-back from the humiliating experience of the Soviet Union falling apart, in a new twenty-first century jacket? Was it a big power exercising influence in its own ‘backyard’? Or was it a case of ‘David and Goliath’, a small power fighting to maintain its territorial integrity against a giant? Or was it a small power more or less falling into a Russian trap, whether or not encouraged by American conservative hawks, just before the American elections? Is it a build-up of ethnic tensions or a case of unfortunate coincidences: an add-up of structural incentives, personal ambition and the presence of weapons, as some claim? Where does one then place the 250,000 Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) in Georgia, in this sense-making process? Interpreting and assessing what this war means for the foreign policy of various countries and their strategic relations is still going on in various think tanks over the world.