They are Russian citizens because over the last few years Russia has handed out citizenship and passports to anyone in South Ossetia who would take them. More generally, I'm not all that comfortable with states' having the right to/should do something because "their" citizens (are alleged to) want that.
> Remind me again when the US intervened in Haiti or
> Guatemala because a foreign backed force was targeting
> civilians and that civilian population asked the US to
> defend them?
>
> This conversation is bordering on crazy.
It is. Sorry. This is the problem with analogies. But my point wasn't that there was an exact correspondence between what the U.S. has done in Haiti and what Russia is doing in Georgia, but that Dwayne's invocation of "neighborhood" as an explanation/justification for what Russia is doing is a pretty flimsy one, and one pretty easily turned into something else. "Neighborhood" is synonymous with "sphere of influence," as far as I can tell.