Soon I’ll be putting it together, I have an enormous amount of info to process and sort it through.

I want to offer my advice for people from the West (US and Europe) who are confused and wondering about what is going on in Ossetia and Georgia – please, read newspapers, go on line and read articles before you make any assumptions.

What you hear on TV is only a tiny twisted part of the big story and that story is so complex that it would be hard to understand it without studying the history of the region and the relationship between Georgians, Ossetians, Abkhazians and Russians continued there for many centuries. In my opinion, neither side is perfectly right here as it almost always is. It was the Georgians who provoked recent escalation, did Russians went over the line protecting their territory there ? May be and may be not… I’m yet to go over all the available info and then I’ll be posting my series of articles on this subject.

Unfortunately, I’ve found that too many people here in a West just see one side of the story (by that I mean only Russians are being blamed for the escalation) and don’t want to accept or just don’t understand that the roots of this conflict are far more complex than it looks. Simply blaming one side in this conflict doesn’t exactly make any sense.

TV is the worst source to get the correct information right now. I’ve found that print media is mostly very accurate and careful about describing the situation correctly. Some major TV networks like MSNBC , BBC, information agency Reuters and many others are quite accurate in their reports too. Strangely most of the major US TV networks are keeping very quiet about the conflict – there was very little said about it and what is said is not always accurate, plus, future presidential elections here are the major subject dominating the TV screens.

Some of the US TV networks, especially CNN (in my opinion) – are the worst place to get the real truthful news, lots of disinformation and confusing info.

I’ve been trying to figure the truth about the events by watching TV, reading American and European newspapers, surfing the Internet. I also watch Russian TV channels and read their newspapers as well.

I do speak many languages, so that helps.

I’ve found that most of the stuff reported by CNN completely contradicts even the official Washington estimate of the situation.

Not being able to understand what the heck is going on at all – because Russian media reports about the conflict completely contradict (naturally) what CNN and some other US media reported, I became so fed up, that I stopped trying to find any reasonable reports on TV here in US and started digging on the Internet, reading major US and European newspapers on line and reading regular newspapers too. What I’ve found in many different newspapers and on-line sources just confirmed my skepticism about how accurate and honest the US TV reports are…

I’m not Russian by the way and I’m not a Russian citizen, but I’m of a mixed Slavic descent and I’m originally from Lithuania. My father’s family spent 19 years of their life leaving in Argentina, but they are originally from Belarus and they did go back to Belarus after Stalin’s death in 1958.

I’ve been living in US for almost 15 years now.

I’m a professional journalist/ writer. I worked for a two major Lithuanian newspapers covering Foreign politics and international relationships.

I’ll try to finish that article as soon as I can, I suspect I’ll be posting series of articles on this conflict, because this subject is so complex.

The best sources you can get your news on a conflict from, in my opinion, are

The New York Times, Washington Post (not anymore, well, sometimes it has crazy articles :O)), BBC.com, Reuters.com, Stratfor.com (although Stratfor.com is a very secretive media/intelligence source, so secretive I call them a “Secret Doughnut Society”).

If you speak French or German, go to their major internet media sources, there is plenty of good info there.

Here are some links to the above mentioned media sources

http://www.nytimes.com

http://www.stratfor.com/

http://www.reuters.com/

http://www.bbc.co.uk/

I’m done for now.

Irina Forden

P.S. I’ve done some mini-editing here and there… perfectionist is my middle name… or may be it’s my former, now gone out of this world (he had cancer and passed away few years ago), editor is standing behind me whispering into my ears his heavenly, lol, words – edit, Irina, edit…

It appears that I spoke too soon about The Washington Post being accurate and reasonable – their latest editorial post sounds more like a Nazi or Soviet propaganda flier… Heck, who is running The Washington Post these days?

the likes of Rupert Murdoch ? and I thought it was a good paper…. their latest articles – “Stopping Russia”… and “How to stop Putin”… – those headlines belong to tabloid magazines…

I suggest these headlines “How to brush your teeth while driving a car”… “How to learn Chinese in 15 min”…

O’K I’ll stop for now… good grief…

No, don’t worry – I’m not a big fan of Mr. Putin (quite an opposite), I just think that a lot of recent coverage of the events is garbage…