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This is a couple of days old but I'm really surprised that British Conservative Party leader David Cameron hasn't gotten more flack for this idea:

Russia’s elite value their ties to Europe - their shopping and their luxury weekends. We should look at the visa regime for Russian citizens. Russian armies can’t march into other countries while Russian shoppers carry on marching into Selfridges.

First of all, I'd like to hear aspiring prime minister Cameron explain to the owners of Selfridges -- not to mention London club owners looking for someone willing to buy cocktails flecked with flakes of 24-carat edible gold -- why they're being punished for Vladimir Putin's foreign policy. Also, wouldn't it actually help Russia's economy to make jet-setting noviy russkiy spend their hard-earned petrorubles in St. Petersburg instead of Soho?

NATALIA KOLESNIKOVA/AFP/Getty Images

There's some interesting Kremlinology (or Moscvology as Blake might have us call it) from Anna Smolchenko in today's Moscow Times. She notes that Dmitry Medvedev's bellicose comments in North Ossetia yesterday -- vowing a "crushing response" to future attacks on Russian citizens and referring to Georgia's leaders as genocidal morons are sharply at odds with the more conciliatory rhetoric he has used in the past. Smolchenko suggests that the president may be getting tough in an effort to reassert his own relevance.

This seems plausible to me. Last Tuesday I noted that it was Medvedev who declared a ceasefire while Vladimir Putin had been the one who effectively started the war. This seemed to be evidence of a good-cop-bad-cop approach from the tandem. But Russia's continued operations in Georgia this past week while Medvedev has repeatedly assured the world that a withdrawal was taking place have only helped confirm what most already suspected: that Medvedev is a glorified PR guy with no power over a state still run by Putin.

Condoleeza Rice seemed to be not-so-subtly hinting at this over the weekend:

The word of the Russian president needs to be upheld by his forces or people are going to begin to wonder if Russia can be trusted."

Members of the foreign press were barred from attending any of the events on Medvedev's trip to the Caucasus which could suggest that the president -- known to read several foreign newspapers every day on the Internet -- isn't happy with how he's being portrayed in the international media.

He might be calculating that if he can't actually influence the policy set by hawks like Putin and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, he might as well just out-hawk them at the podium.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev plays to the gallery in North Ossetia:

The world has seen that even today, there are political morons who are ready to kill innocent and defenseless people in order to satisfy their self-serving interests, while compensating for their own inability to resolve complicated issues by using the most terrible solution -- by exterminating an entire people."

The quote from a senior Russian military commander doesn't really fill me with confidence that the Russian occupation of Georgia is ending any time soon:

I can say for certain when the New Year will come but I cannot give an exact date for the withdrawal of our troops from the conflict area yet," said Col.-General Anatoly Nogovitsyn. "I can only say that we will not be leaving as fast as we came."

Russia seems to be continuing the dismantling of Georgia's miltiary infrastructure even as President Medvedev speaks as if the withdrawal is already happening. In spite of Nogovitsyn's assurances that troops are pulling out of the central Georgian city of Gori, there's no sign that they're leaving.

It's now been almost a week since Medvedev ordered a ceasefire. I'm curious to see how long the Russians can plausibly claim to be withdrawing without any of their troops actually leaving Georgia.

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Here's a conundrum for you, dear readers.

In days of yore, it was handy for journalists to write "the Kremlin" to refer to the people in charge of Russia. It's a word that has a certain allure and mystique to it, and using it helps avoid cumbersome repetition. As a short word, it's also great for headlines.

But now that Russia's president, Dmitry Medvedev, is not really running the country from his Kremlin office, and its prime minister, Vladimir Putin, is demonstrably in control, this usage isn't always accurate anymore.

This headline, for instance, is OK because it's technically true. Medvedev did sign the truce:

Kremlin Signs Truce but Resists Quick Pullout

But this one is not, because it may not be "the Kremlin's" policy at all:

The Kremlin's New Containment Policy

So, does this mean we ink-stained wretches can no longer always use "the Kremlin" as a shorthand for "the Russian government"? And what of "Kremlinology"?

Or has "the Kremlin" become part of the lexicon now, akin to saying "Moscow" or somesuch, to such an extent that the details don't matter? After all, it might get confusing to refer to the "White House," which is where Putin's new office is located, when talking about decisions the Russian government makes.

Discuss.

Kevin Drum does yeoman's work here in batting down the argument, frequently offered in recent days, that the Bush administration somehow encouraged Mikheil Saakashvili's reckless attack on South Ossetia:

Look: Saakashvili came to power on a Georgian nationalist platform of recovering Abkhazia and South Ossetia. He's been jonesing for an excuse to send troops in for years, regardless of anything the U.S. did or didn't do. Likewise, Putin has been eagerly waiting for an excuse to pound the crap out of him in return — again, regardless of anything the U.S. did or didn't do.

Kevin correctly lists Kosovo and NATO enlargement among several "general" drivers of the conflict, but I would be more specific. Let's roll the tape.

When Western countries recognized Kosovo in February, then-President Vladimir Putin immediately threatened to do the same regarding South Ossetia and Abkhazia and promised to deploy more "peacekeeping" troops there. And he made good on his warning in April, granting the two breakaway regions a status just short of official recognition.

The Georgians were duly provoked, and they got busy mobilizing troops and preparing fuel supplies. In May, Russia deployed troops to Abkhazia; Georgia's state minister warned that the two countries were "very close" to war. By August, volunteers were pouring into South Ossetia from southern Russia, and the two sides were trading fire. All the while, as Kevin points out, State Department officials were trying to convince Saakashvili to "stay cool."

Foolishly, he didn't, and here we are. But if anyone encouraged this conflict, it was Moscow, not Washington. If Saakashvili thought the U.S. military would come to his aid, then he's simply delusional -- there was no way it was going to happen.

On a broader level, the Bush administration made two key mistakes. The first was setting an awkward precedent in Kosovo. It would have been smarter to leave the situation ambiguous, like Taiwan. The second was in trying to bring Georgia into NATO prematurely. When in April, Germany and France delayed Georgia's membership action plan (MAP) until it had settled its internal conflicts, that was basically an invitation to Putin to destabilize the country. It would have been better not to push for a MAP at all.

In short, a naive and overconfident West has badly misjudged how Putin would respond to its diplomatic moves. That's the real problem here -- not some imagined whispering in Saakashvili's ear.

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An armor part of a Russian convoy heads along the main road from Gori towards Tblisi as the tense standoff on the north of Georgia continued on August 15 in Gori, Georgia.

No, the Wall Street Journal reports:

Russian and South Ossetian officials have pegged the death toll as high as 2,000. They have maintained that Georgian troops razed the regional capital, Tskhinvali, and left it resembling Stalingrad after the long siege by Nazi troops during World War II. State-controlled television has shown footage of burning buildings and badly damaged infrastructure.

But on the ground in Tskhinvali, where most of the fighting during the five-day conflict occurred, there is little evidence of a high death toll. [...] The civil-liberties group Human Rights Watch, which accused both Russian and Georgian troops of causing civilian casualties, issued a report Wednesday suggesting that the number of dead in Tskhinvali was in the dozens, not more.

STR/AFP/Getty Images

Responding to unsolicited French advice about his treatment of Catholics, Josef Stalin once infamously remarked, "The Pope? How many divisions has he got?"

The same question could be asked of Condoleezza Rice, who today demanded "the immediate and orderly withdrawal of Russian armed forces and the return of those forces to Russia." Appearing with Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili in Tbilisi, the U.S. Secretary of State said firmly: "This must take place and take place now."

We'll see how Russia responds, since frankly the United States has no ability to force the issue. Nor does Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin want to be seen as taking orders from America. The punishments being muttered about in Washington right now -- kicking Russia out of the G-8, deep-sixing its WTO bid, boycotting or trying to kill the 2014 Olympics in Sochi, canceling bilateral meetings -- are pretty underwhelming, I'd imagine, from Russia's point of view.

Still, the Russians ought to be very careful here. If the overarching goal is to intimidate former Soviet satellites from seeking closer ties with the West, they risk doing the opposite: sending such states running pell-mell into America's arms (see: Poland). By overplaying his hand, Putin could turn a victory in Georgia into a major strategic defeat. He ought to find a face-saving way to take Rice's advice.

NASA/Newsmakers

With the space shuttle set to retire in 2010, and its replacement not ready until 2015, the United States had been planning on hitchhiking to the International Space Station for a few years. That may be a bit of a problem now, as the one country with the ability to transport to and from the station turns out to be -- you guessed it -- Russia.

Beyond the rising rhetorical showdown between the two sides, there's also a legal roadblock that may prevent further space cooperation with Russia. The United States needs to negotiate a new contract with the Russian space program, which may be difficult because Congress must first pass a waiver to a 2000 law banning government contracts with states who supported nuclear programs in North Korea and Iran. That includes -- you guessed it -- Russia.

In an election year with an increasingly bellicose Moscow, that's "almost impossible," says Florida Sen. Bill Nelson, a supporter of the waiver who admits America is stuck between a rock and a hard place:

It is a lose-lose situation," Nelson said.

"If our relationship with Russia is strained, who knows if Russia will give us rides in the future?" Nelson asked. "Or if they give us rides, will they charge such an exorbitant price that it becomes blackmail?"

Still, who knows what relations with Russia will be like in 2010? Even if the Cold War is truly back, that doesn't necessarily spell the end of U.S.-Soviet -- er, Russian -- space cooperation. A lot could change in the next few years.

ALEXEY NIKOLSKY/AFP/Getty Images

Negotiators have finally hammered out a deal to base U.S. interceptor missiles in Poland. After a deal was reached to base a radar system in the Czech Republic in July, the Poles were the final holdout for America's controversial missile shield, but the agreement was delayed by the Polish demands for Patriot missiles. According to Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, that demand has been met.

This has been in the works for nearly 18 months and was sure to be resolved eventually, but the timing of this announcement makes it hard not to wonder if events in the Caucasus didn't help to move things along. Poland, having seen what can happen to other wayward countries on Russia's periphery, is sure to welcome an American troop presence while the United States, which hasn't done much to help its ally Georgia, gets to demonstrate that it still has friends in the former Eastern bloc.

Russia would appear to have few options for punishing Poland, a member of both the EU and NATO with a far larger military and economy than Georgia, but after last week it would be foolish to underestimate what Vladimir Putin can accomplish with limited military and political resources.

UPDATE: Killer quote from Tusk:

Poland and the Poles do not want to be in alliances in which assistance comes at some point later - it is no good when assistance comes to dead people. Poland wants to be in alliances where assistance comes in the very first hours of - knock on wood - any possible conflict."

Uriel Sinai/Getty Images

President George W. Bush has announced that the U.S. military will be delivering humanitarian aid to Georgia, a move that his Georgian counterpart Mikheil Saakashvili has described as a "turning point."

The announcement, along with the withdrawal plan that Dmitry Medvedev signed on to this morning, seems like a sign that the war is winding down into the clean-up and recovery phase. Russia's foreign ministry is not thrilled about U.S military involvement but says they're open to "consultations" about how best to deliver aid. (Corrected. See comments.)

The only problem is, Russian troops don't seem in any hurry to leave Georgia. Russian tanks, along with "irregular" volunteers from the North Caucasus, contine to occupy the city of Gori. According to the Russians' laughable explanation, they're sticking around to protect the local population from irregulars, who are stealing cars. This menacing quote from a Russian tank commander doesn't make it sound like he's getting ready to pack up:

It all depends on what Saakashvili is going to say. If he doesn't understand the situation, we'll have to go further. It's only 60 kilometers to Tbilisi."

It's still early to speculate, but it's possible that Russia, in fact, has no intention of leaving Georgia. The longer Ossetian and Abkhazian forces stay within the country proper, the more likely it is that Georgia will be provoked into firing back, giving the Russians a pretext for further military action. So, despite this morning's hopeful signs, Georgia is far from out of the woods yet.

One final observation: If the worst-case scenario does come true, serious questions will be raised over whether any statement by Dmitry Medvedev has any basis in the reality of Russian policy.

Ezra Shaw/Getty Images

Beach volleyball isn't the only event giving Russia fits in Beijing.

More than a few Russian Olympians have faltered in competition and come up well short of national medal expectations. In fact, it wasn't until today that Russia captured its first gold medals of these games, with both Nazyr Mankiev and Islam-Beka Albiev taking top honors in Greco-Roman wrestling. Adding those two golds, Russia's medal count now totals 12, which still leaves it far behind China (27) and the United States (29) -- and pretty unlikely to reach its goal of 80 medals by the games' end.

One Russian who failed to medal was 20-year-old weightlifter Svetlana Tsarukaeva (left), who added insult to injury by banging her head on the door frame as she exited the competition. Anastasia Zueva, favored for the silver in the 100m backstroke, came in a distant fifth.

Most surprising, though, are the number of setbacks in sports that are typically Russia's strengths, including gymnastics (the men's team finished a dismal sixth) and tennis (Maria Sharapova dropped out, and third seed Svetlana Kuznetsova lost in an early round).

So what gives, Russia? It could be that the team is still shaken after five of its members -- including a discus champ and former world-record holding hammer thrower -- were suspended for reportedly trying to cheat on their drug tests. A lack of trainers could also be to blame.

Of course, some might attribute the lackluster showing to bad karma from the Georgia conflict. At least the Russian and Georgian (er, Brazilian?) beach volleyball players put the affair aside, embracing before their match.

In any case, it looks like luck is currently on Georgia's side. As of about 30 minutes ago, the country just won its first gold of the Beijing Games, thanks to Greco-Roman wrestler Manuchar Kvirkelia.

THOMAS COEX/AFP/Getty Images

This is what makes the Olympics great: With their two countries embroiled in conflict, Russia and Georgia took to the sand Wednesday to settle the score in beach volleyball. And Georgia, also the underdog in sport, won the match in three sets.

But the Russians were not about to concede defeat, pointing out that the two Georgians are, in fact, Brazilian:

Cristine Santanna and Andrezza Chagas go by the nicknames of Saka and Rtvelo, which put together spell the Georgian word for Georgia. Cute, perhaps, but not if you've just lost to them at the Olympic Games.

"We were not playing against the Georgian team today," sniffed Natalia Uryadova after losing 12-15 in the third and deciding set. "We were playing against the Brazilian team. If they are Georgian, they would have been influenced [by the war], but certainly they are not."

To be fair, the "Georgian" pair have passports from both Brazil and Georgia, and had trained for two years after receiving personal invitations from Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, whose wife also happens to play beach volleyball. But the two admitted they had only visited the country twice before representing it in the Olympics -- an increasingly common phenomenon, it seems, but one counter to the Olympic spirit.

Georgian Volleyball Federation President Levan Akhvlediani, however, would have none of it, calling the Russians "bad losers" and hailing the victory as "wonderful for the Georgian people."

It's better to make a war... on the sporting fields," Akhvlediani said.

It surely doesn't hurt that on the sporting fields, for this match at least, Georgia won.

Check out this new piece by Evgeny Morozov on how Russian bloggers have responded to the war in Georgia:

The Kremlin's Virtual Army

Shadowy hackers in Moscow and St. Petersburg? Old news. Get ready for the next generation of Russian cyberwarriors.

This isn't the first time the world has looked on sympathetically while Georgia was trounced by Russia. Does this sound familiar?

The President of the Georgian Republic has made an appeal to the League [of Nations] and sympathetic reference to his country's efforts was made by M. Paul Boncour in the Assembly. But it is realized that the League is incapable of rendering material aid, and that the moral influence which may be a powerful force with civilized countries is unlikely to make any impression on Soviet Russia. -The Times. Sept. 16, 1924

Here's Wikipedia on Georgia's "August Uprising."

SERGEI SUPINSKY/AFP/Getty Images

Matt Yglesias, in his new digs at Think Progress, pooh-poohs the notion that the 2008 Georgian War will have implications for other former Soviet states, notably Ukraine.

Writes Matt:

The appeasement frame rests on the idea that it’s some kind of slippery slope from Russian bombers hitting Tblisi to attacks on Talinn, Kiev, Warsaw and who knows where else. But that’s to view international politics as some kind of purely abstract, logical affair where if Russia gets away with one thing there’s nothing to stop them from marching as far west as they please. In practice, the issue is whether there’s a slipper slope of capabilities and there clearly isn’t.

This ignores the fact that there is a lot that Russia can and probably will do to make trouble for Ukraine. If there's anything we know about Vladimir Putin, it is that he has a temper and that he doesn't make idle threats.

What might Ukraine expect in retaliation for expressing solidarity with Georgia? Well, for one, it might find itself a wee bit short on gas this winter. Mysterious separatist groups might start to cause trouble in Crimea, where Russia's Black Sea Fleet is based.

It's also worth remembering that nearly a quarter of Ukraine's population are Russian-speakers who, in large part, were never really on board with the pro-Western Orange Revolution. Russia will undoubtedly ramp up the use of "political technology" to give pro-Russian political forces a boost. I think that when people are talking about the Russian threat, this kind of low-level subversion is primarily what they mean -- not tanks in the streets of Kiev.

UPDATE: Yglesias responds:

If people don't mean to conjure up images of tanks rolling into Kiev — or at a minimum, bombers in the sky above — when they talk about future Russian pressure on Ukraine, then they shouldn't use inflammatory language about Munich and appeasement.

The South Ossetia war may be winding down but fighting continues in Georgia's other breakaway province, Abkhazia. Roughly 3,000 Abkhaz troops attacked Georgian military positions in the disputed Kodori Gorge this morning. The region's president Sergei Bagapsh claims, “We will take the region under complete control in a few days.”

Russia has escalated its "peacekeeping" presence in the region to 9,000 troops in recent days but denies that they took part in this assault though. At this point, they don't really need to. It's hard to imagine the Georgian military launching a major counteroffensive after the Ossetian catastrophe.

That Dmitry Medvedev issued his instructions to the Russian military to pull out of Georgia just before he met with Nicolas Sarkozy for peace negotiations seems significant. Russia ended this war exactly when they wanted to, without waiting to be told.

It was also a nice touch that it was Medvedev who made the anouncement. Remember that it was Vladimir Putin who said "war has started" last Friday. This good-cop-bad-cop approach to world affairs seems quite effective for the tandem.

The war itself was pure Putin tough: a brutal yet measured display of force. Russia certainly demonstrated that its troops could have marched right into Saakashvili's office without the world doing anything about it. But this is not a repeat of the Cold War and Putin is not Leonid Brezhnev. Occupying Georgia is probably more trouble than it's worth when Russia can simply "throw it against the wall" to show it is possible.

When Putin has opposition political leaders jailed or beaten up, it's not because they pose much threat to him -- he and his allies could win any national election fair and square -- but because he wants to destroy the perception that a meaningful opposition even exists.

Georgia never really posed much of a threat to Russian security, but Georgia's government and citizens had the perception that Western support allowed them to determine their own destiny, even if that meant opposing their powerful Northern neighbor. That perception has now been effectively destroyed.

Writing in the feverish runup to the Iraq war, the National Review's Jonah Goldberg endorsed the following foreign-policy doctrine, which he attributed to his colleague Michael Ledeen:

Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business."

This was never a wise prescription for U.S. policy, but it is a remarkably apt description of what Russia just did to Georgia.

Could Russia have responded to Georgia's assault on South Ossetia in a more measured way? Sure. But from Vladimir Putin's perspective, this was a great opportunity to teach Georgia a lesson and encourager les autres along its periphery. And by shutting the operation day just a few days in, Russia has probably avoided a coherent, punitive Western response.

Over the long term, certainly, Europe and the United States will eye Russia with much greater suspicion. And this war is certainly going to strengthen the Russia hawks, who see their views vindicated.

Inside Russia, it is a victory for the cold warriors and a huge embarrassment for Dmitry Medvedev, who was finally exposed this weekend as a Potemkin president when Putin visibly took charge of the situation. That could doom Medvedev's efforts to crack down on corruption and promote the rule of law -- vital reforms that would ultimately do more good for Russia than any amount of mucking around in the former Soviet Union.

The question now is: Will Russia overreach? Fresh off their blitzkrieg victory in Georgia, will Putin & co. try to stir up fresh troubles in the Crimea? What kind of punishment will they try and mete out to Poland and the Baltic states for supporting Georgia? To the Czech Republic? We can only wait and see.