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In Georgia, shepherds who've strayed too close to the border have been imprisoned in Tskhinvali, South Ossetia, their families left with no idea of when their husband, father, brother, or son might return home.

The road that once connected Georgia’s capital, Tbilisi, to Tskhinvali is blocked by barricades and machine-gun nests.

“Ossetia United — with Russia and with Putin,” say letters scrawled in white paint on the road north from Tskhinvali.

Just as a Post reporter was asking South Ossetia’s Bibilov about Surkov during an interview in the president’s office in Tskhinvali, a beige telephone rang.

The financial threads between the Kremlin and Ukraine’s separatists pass through a sleek office building on Stalin Street in Tskhinvali, the main city of South Ossetia.