Joshua Kucera has a great travelogue article over at Slate.com about his (attempted) trip to South Ossetia, a place where "It's clear that the government does not want journalists roaming around." He writes about his near-arrest over a non-controversial photo, how half the men on the streets are either police or military, and hitting the vodka bar scene in Tskhinvali to hang with the spetsnaz.
Later Kucera moves on to Azerbaijan, which is also very interesting, but not before discovering some of the real emotional motivation behind Ossetian separatism - something beyond the agendas of Moscow and Tbilisi.
