Jay Reding sums up the Georgia War pretty capably:

Putin wants to ensure that Russia, and not those upstart republics to its southwest, gets the benefit of supplying most of Europe’s natural gas. The Georgian crisis was draped with the idea that Russia had to protect South Ossetia, but the truth of the matter is that these last few days have been about nothing but realpolitik. Putin and Medvedev are trying to get money and power—and that is all too easy when the Russian Army can act as private enforcers.

President Saakashvili made a crucial mistake in provoking the Russians over Ossetia, although it’s not clear how much the Georgians were themselves provoked by Ossetian agents working at the behest of the Kremlin. The Georgian Army can’t match the strength of the Russian Army, and the United States was not about to get themselves involved in any conflict between the two. The Georgians unleashed something they could not control, which in war can be fatal.

Russia has been invaded time and time again over the last thousand years – and their societal collective memory does go back that far.

It’s given them both a sense of paranoia about bordering powers, and a sense of entitlement – reinforced by seventy years of superpower status – about their means to deal with that paranoia.

History really didn’t end in 1991. it turns out.