Russian UN Ambassador Vitaly Churkin has said that Georgia’s movements on the frontier with South Ossetia and Abkhazia are ‘categorically inflating political and military hysteria’.  A high-ranking diplomat has said that including the US in monitoring missions in Georgia would be ‘extremely harmful’ and would raise ‘the likelihood of border provocations,’ as well as endangering the reset.   Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has downplayed Joe Biden’s ‘Bush-like’ comments as ‘not normative’, saying that US voters who chose Obama voted against ‘old America’.  Biden’s comments were ‘appealing to the relatively progressive part of the Moscow elite’ argues a piece in RFE/RL.  To read an interview with Thomas Graham, a former senior director at the National Security Council for Russia, see the Telegraph.  The Obama administration says it does not preclude the possibility of Russia joining NATO, if the state meets the criteria.  Apparently Russia and Iran will engage in joint naval exercises for the first time in the Caspian Sea.