Putin flexes influence in Georgia action

MOSCOW, Aug. 12 (UPI) -- Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, who ran Russia for eight years, showed his influence in the country's actions in Georgia, geopolitical observers said.

"Georgia, in a way, is suffering for all that happened to Russia in the last 20 years," Alexander Rahr, a German foreign policy scholar and a Putin biographer, told The New York Times.

Putin's protege Dmitri Medvedev may be president of Russia but Putin is running the country, observers said. As an example, they point to two images -- Putin mingling with refugees on the border with South Ossetia and Medvedev sitting behind a desk in Moscow, the Times said.

After the Russian action in Georgia, speculation abounds on what Putin intends to do, the Times said. Putin and others said Russia doesn't plan to occupy Georgia but was defending its citizens.

Flexing military muscle raises the question of how Russia will exert its power, the Times said.

"The problem is, what kind of great power is emerging?" Dmitri Trenin, deputy director of the Carnegie Moscow Center, told the Times. "Is this a great power that lives by the conventions of the world as it exists in the 21st century?"