People here rightly show a primary concern for civilians, but it's important the thinking not stop there because Russia has a clear record. To favor the development of a Russian "counterweight" to America is to favor seeing more power in the hands of a regime that does NOT have a decent human rights record and whose claims that they acted to prevent an ongoing genocide are not borne out by the facts.
Grozny also provides real evidence of what expected casualties and physical destruction look like when artillery rockets really are used deliberately against civilian targets.
The pro-Russian argument starts with an attempted, implied false equality between the Russian action in Grozny and the Georgian action in Tskhinvali.
Even brief look at the Wikipedia article on the Battle of Grozny (the 1999-2000 one, in this case) will show anyone who is curious that the Russian operation was far, far more cruel and could possibly be considered genocidal by modern military standards. The Russians encircled the city, cutting off retreat and any significant hope of reinforcement for the Chechens. The six-month siege started with two MONTHS of pre-raid bombing done by forces well outside the range of the Chechens. During this siege, the Russians relied on massive use of both aerial bombardment and long-range tactical (including SCUD and Scarabs) as well as battery artillery missiles with expanded-kill warheads like fuel-air and cluster munitions (including TOS-1 220mm, 30-rocket launchers, as well as the longer-range, smaller-warhead Grads and many, many others) These rockets and bombs were not dropped in a "surgical" or even a "ground-clearing" way against troop concentrations as an attack was in progress. Instead, they were fired in an infrastructure- and will-destroying siege strategy well before the Russian advances.
After a couple months of bombing, the Russians dropped their famous leaflets:
"Persons who stay in the city will be considered terrorists and bandits and will be destroyed by artillery and aviation. There will be no further negotiations."
Over the next four months, the Russians used probing attacks to draw fire and would then hit the areas with more rockets and artillery. Grozny was, of course, completely flattened and thousands killed.
I'm not really going into the artillery here, other than to say that artillery is usually used with fair accuracy. Artillery is almost always the most-destructive weapon of war, but it is used by all sides about the same way.
Tskhinvali, on the other hand, was not a sieve. The city saw exchanges between Georgian and Ossetian and some Russian fire for days before the Georgian raid, mainly on the outskirts. On August 7, people had not been hiding in basements for weeks as in Grozny but were out in the streets. So the Georgians clearly had not taken the opportunity to shell civilians up to that point - if they ever did.
With fewer than a half-dozen operational jets, the Georgians really only have standard Grad 120mm, 40-rocket launchers to provide fire to support their artillery. At the behest of the U.S. and Nato, the Georgians had cut their army in about half and re-equipped it to make it a light, maneuverable NATO-standards ground force. Georgians have gotten significant communications and reconnaissance infrastructure and even personnel from the U.S. and NATO.
After the escalating hostilities, the Georgians apparently decided to attack on August 6-7. They targeted Tskhinvali and seemingly went in with everything they had. A couple of their jets were reported over the city and may have bombed it, but they couldn't have flown many sorties. Probably the most terrifying weapons (apart from artillery, which always causes the most destruction in any war) used by the Georgians were the Grad 120mm missiles. These are not much compared to cluster or fuel-air munitions, from warheads twice and three times the size, but they are pretty awfull
These missiles were, it seems, used against Russians and Ossetian forces in a "ground clearing" mode. The idea of this tactic is that the Grad launchers lay down an oblong shape of intense fire so that your troops and armor can move in quickly behind it. In urban fighting, this tactic is deadly on civilians because it is relatively imprecise.
The Grad doesn't launch a large missile, but it can launch all its missiles in less than a minute, so there is not a lot of time for people who face the attack to get under cover - which is the point of the Grad in a military context. Had the Georgians aimed at busy civilian areas in an effort to kill civilians, there would have been a slaughter. It seems they did not, but aimed at a part of town where, we must assume, there were Ossetian and/or Russian troops, although clearly civilians were hurt and killed. But its also becoming clear that it was nothing like the thousands claimed.
It seems that the Georgian forces were moving in very quickly behind this missile fire. It wasn't a siege. In such an instance, there is no benefit to hitting civilian. The advancing forces need every rocket to provide a "corridor" for them to enter the battle space. Tskhinvali was an armed city and the Georgians did not have firepower to spare.
The Georgian attack was an awful and a stupid thing, but the comparison to a Grozny or Sarajevo is totally unsupported by the evidence. First, the casualties as reported by international groups are not the initial, Russian figures but much more what we would expect from a military attack rather than an attack against civilians. Tragic, senseless bloodshed, certainly, but not genocide.
It's also clear that a significant part of the physical destruction of Tskhinvali was caused by Russian munitions. The very large number of destroyed Georgian self-propelled guns and tanks in the city shows that the Russians hit back very hard once the Georgians were in Tskhinvali. This time - as opposed to Grozny - the Russians used far more precise methods, although they did hit Georgian civilian targets in a strategic way. Even with precise munitions, the Russians clearly did a lot of damage to the city. Fortunately their attack was a rout and the Georgians fled quickly.
The Russians also took the opportunity to advance quickly into Abkhazia where the Georgians had only a small force that was already being engaged effectively by the Abkhaz and of course to Gori and Puti. I think the Russians may leave the former but will not leave the latter.
So the clear contrast is this Grozny was a slow, grinding, brutal attack on all the people of a city - a siege. Tskhinvali was a rapid attack on a city using somewhat unsophisticated weapons but using those weapons to cause maximum disorder to opposing forces, not to kill or demoralize a population.
The point here is that the Russians are using accusations of an enemy's brutality that don't make logical sense and for which there is no evidence. Yet their own army has shown far, far more callous disregard for civilian life and property. The Russians were fast and precise this time, but is there any reason to think that this command structure would not repeat Grozny?
I don't think that lying about what the Georgians did in Tskhinvali makes the Russian army credible humanitarians. If the Russian army has not changed from the time of Grozny, then clearly this is potentially a humanitarian step backwards.