On a day when some 8.500 Russian troops lumbered into the North Caucasus for Russia’s biggest military exercise since the Georgia war, Al Jazeera English has an excellent field piece by Tbilisi-based journalist and blogger Matthew Collin detailing the tensions on the ground as OSCE and UN monitors up stakes in South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

As Daniela Ivanova noted previously in this blog, both missions were vetoed by Russia, essentially on the grounds that the two disputed provinces are now sovereign states (according to Russia, if virtually no one else), and therefore the missions no longer have a mandate.  Collin contrasts this legalistic argument with a snippet of life in the Georgian border village of Ergneti, where locals fear the impact of the international agencies’ departure on an already fragile security situation. “At night it’s terrible,” a farmer who returned after the fighting to his nearly demolished home tells the reporter, “because you can hear all the burnt metal rattling in the wind.”

Meanwhile, AP notes, Russia’s Caucasian war games will run through July 6 - “the day that President Barack Obama arrives in Moscow for a highly anticipated summit with Russia’s Dmitry Medvedev.”