The most serious result of the five-day Russian-Georgian war was the emergence of a new entity in the South Caucasus, which is South Ossetia, Caucasus Institute Director Alexander Iskandaryan said during a roundtable discussion focusing on South Ossetia and Abkhazia earlier this week.

The leading political analyst explained that during the years of struggle for independence in the early 1990s, unlike Abkhazia and Nagorno-Karabakh, South Ossetia saw no ethnic cleansings and the population there included both Georgians and Ossetians.