US Vice-President Joe Biden has adopted a more aggressive tone on Russia, stating that the Kremlin used a ‘pretext’ to invade Georgia, and has asserted that renewed relations with Russia ‘have not…will not, and…cannot’ imperil the relationship Georgia has with the US.  To see a video of Biden’s standing ovation met address, see the BBC.  Biden has called upon Russia to honor last summer’s ceasefire agreement, including the withdrawal of troops to their ‘pre-conflict positions’ out of Georgia’s ‘territorial area’.  He has suggested that hope for restoring territorial unity is through ensuring the state is ‘secure, free and democratic’.  The New York Times argues that Biden’s message on how to reclaim control of South Ossetia and Abkhazia ‘had a hard kernel of advice, though: do not try to fight Russia‘ but rather to construct a country ‘so appealing that the separatists would eventually return voluntarily’.