selene

Of Russia and Black Swans

"anyone know if tensions between Georgia and Russia have been an ongoing thing making this conflict inevitable?"

Gee, let me think. Well, there was the "freezing" of S. Ossetia and Abkhazia ten years ago, when the USSR was breaking up and these two regions made a bid for independence from both Georgia (of which they had been part) and Russia, but didn't really get it -- they were just allowed to basically run their own show unofficially. Or you could go back to the about 200 years before that of Czarist rule of Georgia, which has always considered itself its own country.

As another poster has said, if you didn't happen to know this off the top of your head, there's always Google and Wikipedia.