Dmitry Medvedev stepped up the brewing territorial conflict in the Arctic today by announcing that Russia would formalize its northern border. The competition for energy resources in the Arctic region has been heating up as global warming has made them more accessible.

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Under international law, the five countries with Arctic claims -- Russia, Canada, the United States, Norway, and Denmark (Greenland) -- can exploit resources up to 200 miles off their coastlines. The Russians say their continental shelf extends under the North Pole, where they used a miniature submarine to plant the Russian flag last year in a widely reported publicity stunt.

There could be as many as 10 billion tons of oil at stake in the Arctic seabed and today, Medvedev linked the region to Russia's energy future:

Our first and fundamental task is to turn the Arctic into a resource base for Russia in the 21st century. Using these resources will entirely guarantee Russia's energy security. [...] We must finalize and draft a law on setting the southern border of the Arctic region.... This is our responsibility to future generations."

The folks in Canada, which has a massive Arctic claim as well, aren't taking this very well. Canada was already looking north uneasily after the invasion of Georgia and has been conducting military excercises in the region. Some commentators are now calling for Canada to increase its activity in the Arctic in order to bolster its territorial claim. There is apparently no ban on weapons in the area so it's not hard to imagine things getting out of hand.

As for the United States' own Arctic rights, I can't help thinking that this is an international topic that the governor of Alaska might actually be expected to know about. Maybe Sean Hannity could ask her for us tonight?

Russia's campaign to win international recognition for the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia isn't going as well as they may have hoped. So far only Nicaragua, of all places, has signed on. Belarus and Venezuela were both staunch supporters of Russia during the war with Georgia but haven't yet indicated that they intend to recognize the two regions. Moscow will push its case at a meeting of seven former-Soviet republics today in Moscow.

If you're keeping score for the "new cold war" at home, that's Kosovo: 46, South Ossetia and Abkhazia: 2.

Abkhazian flag	South Ossetian flag

Russia's State Duma unanimously approved a resolution today to recognize South Ossetia and Abkhazia, the breakaway regions of Georgia, as independent states. This move has been hinted at for months but obviously, as RIA-Novosti observes, "the Georgian-Russian conflict has dramatically changed the position of the self-proclaimed republics."

President Medvedev still has to approve the resolution, but it's not too early to consider the implications of Russia's recognition. This development seems to be the best indication so far that the dreaded Kosovo effect -- the emboldening of separatist movements around the world in the wake of Kosovo's recognition -- was more than just hype. This was exactly what the Georgians had in mind when they decided not to recognize Kosovo last winter.

While U.N. membership for the two new states is about as likely as Putin and Saakashvili taking a fishing trip this fall, it will be interesting to see if any countries follow Russia's lead and recognize them. Recognition has historically had much more to do with politics than international law and it's quite possible that countries hoping to curry favor with the Russians --Belarus and Venezuela come to mind -- might set up ties with the de facto states. Analyst Paul Goble believes 15 to 20 countries might join in, hardly an international consensus but still enough to avoid a "Cyprus scenario" where the states would be recognized by only one other country.

This month's events have given some other frozen conflict participants pause as well. Medvedev was leaning pretty hard on Moldova's president this weekend, urging him not to repeat the "Georgian mistake" by trying to retake control of the quasi-independent Transnistria region, which is tepidly supported by Russia. The Moldovans seem to have gotten the message and I wouldn't be surprised if Moscow continued to use the former Soviet Union's separatist movements for political leverage. (Crimea, perhaps?)

Let the recognition wars begin.

PIUS UTOMI EKPEI/AFP/Getty Images

Here's a little-noticed story suggesting that, despite the Russo-Georgian war, the international system is alive and well.

Claimed by both Nigeria and Cameroon, the Bakassi peninsula has a local population that considers itself Nigerian, but is believed to hold rich oil and gas deposits. You might think such a situtation is a recipe for disaster.

Not so. Nigeria has just officially ceded Bakassi to Cameroon, honoring a 2002 ruling by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and bringing a peaceful close to a decades-long despute. U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon hailed the transfer as "a model for negotiated settlements of border disputes," and Nigerian officials cited the importance of international law in reaching the settlement:

The gains made in adhering to the rule of law may outweigh the painful losses of ancestral homes," said the head of the Nigerian delegation, Attorney General Mike Aondoakaa.

The agreement isn't perfect. Some analysts expressed concern that armed groups opposed to the handover will sow violence to further delay the deal.

Still, in an age when nationalism and natural resources seem to trump all, it's an encouraging sign. Hopefully, Nigeria's move will further legitimize the international legal system, which has seen its rulings recently ignored by the United States and Sudan. Now Georgia, too, is seeking the ICJ's assistance to remedy its conflict with Russia. Unfortunately, I'd expect it to be easier for Russia to ignore the ICJ than it was for Nigeria.

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Yesterday, a shorn and shaven Radovan Karadzic faced his first day in court at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.

The Karadzic arrest has been hailed as a pivotal turning point in Serbia's path to EU cooperation and accession. But although Karadzic was captured in Serbia, his crimes were in creating the ethnically divided state that is Bosnia. And in Bosnia today, the story remains less than comforting.

In a compelling call for a revitalization of international efforts in the still-fractured country, Paddy Ashdown, former head of the Office of the High Representative in Bosnia, explains:

Bosnia's predominantly Serb entity, Republika Srpska, Karadzic's creation, has seen the vacuum where will and policy should be. Its premier, Milorad Dodik, is now aggressively reversing a decade of reforms. He has set up the parallel institutions and sent delegations to Montenegro to find out how they broke away….

Meanwhile, in European capitals the growing view goes like this. We invested 13 years of hard work and huge resource in Bosnia. Now it is stable and peaceful and we are rather tired. Kosovo has proved it is possible to divide a country. What matter if Bosnia becomes another Cyprus?…

This is folly of a very dangerous order. What happens to the Muslim populations who have moved back to Republika Srpska, even to Srebrenica, if they are handed back to an exclusively Serb-dominated regime? What happens to Bosnia's shining star, the multi-ethnic, markedly successful sub-entity of Brcko, hemmed in by Republika Srpska? Is it to be handed over, too? I do not believe Bosnia is likely to go back to conflict; most of its people are just too war-weary. But the one event that could change that calculation in favour of blood would be to return to the old Karadzic/Milosevic plan to divide Bosnia.

But minus those few returnees and that one "shining star," Bosnia is divided, functioning largely as two separate, ethnically split states. Yes, it's a sad fact -- one that U.N. peacekeepers allowed to materialize between 1992 and 1995, and one that any international efforts will be hard pressed to undo.

It's no wonder the celebration over Karadzic's arrest in Bosnia has been short-lived. For as Bosnian novelist Aleksandar Hemon concludes in an excellent NYT op-ed, "Justice is good, but a peaceful life would have been much better."

FILE; JOHN D MCHUGH/AFP/Getty Images

Stuart Hill, the owner of a small island off the coast of Scotland, declares he is no longer under British rule:

I have recently become the owner of a tiny island off Papa Stour, which itself (for the benefit of non-Shetlanders) is a small island off the west coast of Shetland. I am returning to the Nordic tradition by re-naming it Forvik Island – Island of the Bay of Sheep. On 21st June 2008, Forvik, by my Declaration of Dependence, reverted to Shetland’s true constitutional position – that of a Crown Dependency. Other Crown Dependencies include The Isle of Man and The Channel Islands.

Forvik Island, or Forvik for short, recognises neither the British Government, nor the European Union as its superior. Because of Shetland’s unique history, there can have been no legal basis for Shetland to have been involved with either. It recognises Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth I of Scotland and II of the United Kingdom as head of state.

Hill is also inviting others to apply for citizenship. If you are not a resident of the Shetland Islands, you can become an "honorary citizen of Forvik" by forking over one Forvik gulde, a currency tied to the daily market price of gold at a rate of 13 percent. Honorary citizens get a share of the profits from land sales (the island is 2.5 acres in size) as well as "duty-free activities, company registrations, vehicle registrations and other activities."

I wonder if was inspired by our primer on "How to Start Your Own Country in Four Easy Steps."

(Hat tip: Reason)

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Is Georgia teetering on the brink of civil war? Or will the status of the breakaway republics of Abkhazia and South Ossetia remain an ambiguous frozen conflict? Either way, Russia wins.

On Wednesday, the Russian foreign ministry ratcheted up the pressure on Georgia by establishing legal ties with the two republics, which have been quasi-independent entities since the early 1990s. Georgia's leaders are predictably apoplectic over what they see as a Russian annexation of one third of their territory. Putin claims he wants to take steps to improve relations with Georgia and has instructed his government to lift trade restrictions between the countries. These overtures haven't gone over that well either, though. The United States and European Union strongly criticized Russia's meddling in the breakaway regions, but the Georgians probably sense that Western onlookers aren't prepared to do much to back up their words.

Whatever happens, it's likely to be good for Putin. If violence breaks out in the republics, it effectively scuttles Georgia's bid to join NATO. If the stalemate persists and Georgia is forced to live with the new arrangement, it demonstrates Russia's ability to impose its will on its neighbors without international consequences. In either scenario, Putin also gets to attack Western hypocrisy over the recognition of Kosovo.

I guess "lame duck" doesn't really translate in Russian.

This week’s Tuesday map comes to us from a billboard controversy south of the border.

Created by advertising agency Teran/TBWA and launched a few weeks ago in Mexico, the Absolut billboard ad depicted pre-1848 North America -– before the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo turned Mexican territories into what is now the American South West.

The campaign was obviously intended for a Mexican audience, as Favio Ucedo, creative director of a top Latino advertising firm, explained:

Many (Americans) aren’t going to understand it. Americans in the East and the North or in the center of the county -- I don’t know if they know much about the history… Probably Americans in Texas and California understand perfectly, and I don’t know how they’d take it.”

But Absolut quickly learned just how some Americans would take it: not well.  Although the ad never appeared in the U.S., it was picked up by American media outlets, causing a flurry of complaint from U.S. citizens (some more creative than others).

As of Friday, Absolut’s maker Vin & Spirits had decided to withdraw the apparently offensive advertisement even though it "was based upon historical perspectives and was created with a Mexican sensibility... [and was] in no way was meant to offend or disparage, nor...advocate an altering of borders..."

Ireland's decision to send Dustin the Turkey -- a crass puppet who rides around in a shopping cart -- as its representative to the Eurovision Song Contest was met with mixed reviews by audience members last month. But the Irish aren't the only ones calling this turkey "fowl." Once again, because of the Macedonia name issue, the Greeks are up in arms.

At one point in the turkey's song "Irelande Douze Pointe" ("Ireland Twelve Points," in reference to the maximum points each country can give a contestant), Dustin sings, "Eastern Europe we love you, do you like Irish stew, or goulash as it is to you?" then proceeds to list countries in Eastern Europe one by one, including Macedonia (check here for clearer audio -- the lyrics are pretty great).

Ever since Macedonia's independence in 1991, Athens has argued that the name "Macedonia" is a part of Hellenic cultural heritage and that the former Yugoslav republic expresses territorial claims on northern Greece by using it. Now, thanks to Greek paranoia, rumor has it that Dustin the Turkey will have to join the U.N. in calling the country FRY Macedonia ("The Former Yugoslav Republic of...") in his lyrics.

But the name issue gets far more serious on the security front. Macedonia hopes to be invited to join NATO at the Bucharest Summit this coming Wednesday, but an invitation requires the unanimous support of existing NATO members, including Greece. Despite months of U.N.-supervised negotiations, neither Athens nor Skopje seem capable of coming to an agreement any time soon, spelling trouble for Macedonia's NATO aspirations.

Greece may have Macedonia in a NATO bind, but come May we'll see who gets the last Eurovision laugh. With acts like this as the winning standard, it's really anyone's game.

In an interview today, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov linked the ongoing violence in Tibet to the dreaded "Kosovo precedent":

There are grounds to presume that this is not occurring by chance [...] You can see what is happening in China's autonomous region of Tibet, how the separatists there are acting. The Albanians in Macedonia are already demanding a level of autonomy that is a clear step toward independence. Furthermore, events in other areas of the world give us grounds to assume that we are only at the beginning of a very precarious process."

It seems like the sinister implication of Kosovo for the future of the nation-state is fast becoming one of the Russian government's favorite rhetorical devices. Except for when it isn't of course.

(Hat tip: Robert Amsterdam)

A senior EU official has told reporters that Russia may be preparing to recognize Abkhazia, a breakaway region of Georgia:

There is a growing preoccupation and anxiety that Russia may be paving the way for recognition of Abkhazia," EU External Relations Commissioner Benita Ferrero-Waldner said while reaffirming EU support for Georgia's borders.

"Georgia's territorial integrity has always been clearly supported by the EU... this is absolutely clear," she told a news conference before EU foreign ministers were due to discuss Georgia at their monthly meeting in Brussels.

"We will be discussing Georgia and... what can we do in order to support more strongly Georgia in a difficult situation."

Russia took a first step toward recognition last week when it lifted trade restrictions with the territory. It's hard to see this as anything but cynical "Kosovo payback" against Georgia's allies -- the United States and the EU -- that can only further destabalize an already volatile region. But since Abkhazia has been de facto independent since the early '90s and meets most of international law's minimum criteria for sovereignty, it will be interesting to see how Brussels and Washington will make the case that it is less deserving of statehood than Kosovo. We may be witnessing a return to the politically motivated recognition battles of the Cold War era.

The Russians may also be playing with fire by stirring up latent nationalism in the Caucasus -- a policy that they may come to regret down the road.

China Photos/Getty Images

Give Björk points for chutzpah. At the end of her song, "Declare Independence," the iconoclastic Icelandic pop singer shouted, "Tibet! Tibet!" The incident would be unremarkable were she not in Shanghai at the time. Naturally, her outburst wasn't reported in China's rigidly state-controlled press, but it has stirred up nationalist anger online. And it made the closing moments of her concert a little awkward:

The atmosphere was very strange, uncomfortable compared to the rest of the concert," said audience member Stephen Gow, a British teacher who lives in Shanghai. People didn't boo, Gow said, but they left the Shanghai International Gymnastic Center hurriedly.

Björk appears to use the song as a neo-Wilsonian Mad-Lib. Last month, she dedicated it to Kosovo, and in the video for it, she wears an outfit bearing the flags of Greenland and the Faroe Islands, both Danish territory.

Luis Acosta/Getty Images

Last year, FP's "Top 10 Stories You Missed" highlighted an issue that hadn't yet gotten a lot of attention in the press -- the fact that nearly half of the 700 miles of fence being built along the U.S.-Mexico border was actually slated to be "virtual" fence. Both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have said they prefer virtual to more conventional fencing. But it might be time for both campaigns to go back to the drawing board. After evaluating a virtual fence pilot project, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) has thrown cold water on the notion that such fences can be relied upon to secure the border any time soon:

The pilot virtual fence included nine mobile towers, radar, cameras, and vehicles retrofitted with laptops and satellite phones or handheld devices. They were to be linked to a near-real-time, maplike projection of the frontier that agents could use to track targets and direct law enforcement resources. GAO investigators said that [the virtual fence] could not process large amounts of sensor data. The resulting delays made it hard for operators in a Tucson command center 65 miles to the north to lock cameras on targets. Radar systems were also triggered inadvertently by rain and other environmental factors. Cameras had trouble resolving images at five kilometers when they were expected to work at twice that distance...."

The initial phase of the virtual fence -- covering approximately 100 miles near Yuma, Arizona, and El Paso, Texas -- was supposed to be completed by the end of 2008. But the GAO now estimates that it will take until the end of 2011 to complete that initial 100 miles of virtual fence. That means it will take until nearly the end of the next president's first term to deploy a virtual fence along a tiny 100-mile stretch of the border. After that, friends, there's just 1,900 miles to go. I figure we can get the whole thing "virtually secured" sometime around the turn of the century.

Listening to the Democrats talk about using science to secure the southern border is like listening to Republicans talk about using technology to solve climate change. Technology, we are assured, will solve all of America's problems without us having to make any real changes. Sadly, in both cases, that's just cover for not having a real policy to address the problem.