More from Wikipedia:

Not only did violent conflict break out towards the end of 1991, but when 100,000 South Ossetians fled, most "crossed the border into North Ossetia", that is, into Russia proper.





It's more than a bit of a stretch to read Sudetenland into the current crisis. People who vote with their feet make their view quite clear--except perhaps to those brilliant foreign policy analysts who are prisoners of their own Manichean world view and so clueless that they, for instance, mistake GWB for Churchill and do not recognize Bush's Iraq propaganda campaign. (To pick two purely theoretical examples.)

As Paul has pointed out, the other former members of the Soviet sphere of influence are plenty big enough to give Russia pause. To anybody who reads, it's plenty clear who the majority of South Ossetians see as the long-term aggressor. And it's not Russia.