Cognitive Labs

Just as people were ready to be dazzled by the bling of Olympic medals, it's time to take out that dusty game of Risk.

Roll the dice, send in three armies from Kamchatka.

What's starting as a little war in Georgia (the country north of Turkey and Armenia and Iran) is uncomfortably close to the oil fields of the Caucasus and the pipelines that take the crude for transshipment.

Georgia was in the USSR at the time of World War II and one of the objectives of the Wehrmacht's Army Group south during operation Barbarossa in 1941, which was to seize the land around the Volga, sweep around the Black Sea and hold the Caucasus oil fields since Germany had no other source of oil than limited supplies in Rumania. (Iran was occupied by Britain and the USSR in World War II and most of the petroleum-producing regions were under British hegemony)

The area in question is peninsular strip of land on the lower right hand side of the bluish region.

Labels: global, kamchatka, ossetia, risk