Bloomberg reports that Russia has ‘accused Georgia of firing at South Ossetia’.  The Foreign Ministry states: ‘the August 2008 event developed along similar lines’.  Russia says it will not hesitate to fight back. Georgia has denied any such attack.  EU monitors claim to have found no evidence of firing in the region.  Georgia has claimed that Russian troops entered the village of Kveshi in an attempt to push back the border.  ‘Russia has largely achieved what it wanted’ from last year’s conflict with Georgia, says the FT.  South Ossetian President Eduard Kokoity has asserted that the breakaway state wants to ‘be united with Russia’ and that greater deployments of Russian troops would be welcomed.  Georgia’s President Mikheil Saakashvili seems to have accepted Joe Biden’s assertion that military action to regain South Ossetia and Abkhazia is not be a possibility.  Ellen Barry in the New York Times sees the Biden affair through the optic of different rhetorical habits.