Wired’s Danger Room reports that Russia may have been secretly trying to destabilize  Georgia before the battle in 2008.

The brief shooting war between Russia and Georgia in 2008 was just the final, action-packed scene of a years-long drama. As the U.S. Embassy in the Georgian capitol of Tblisi saw it, Moscow spent much of the previous decade destabilizing the former Soviet republic, using “missile attacks and murder plots,” natural-gas “sabotage” and support to Georgian separatists.