We do not yet know whether Russia will really pull its troops out of Georgia, or whether this is just the beginning of a wave of separatist conflicts that Russia is trying to foment in former-Soviet republics in an effort to rebuild the Eastern Bloc. But there’s at least one commentator out there who is convinced that by the very act of sending in its troops, Russia has already revealed how little influence it wields in its former empire. Here’s veteran Israeli commentator Sever Plocker on Ynet:

Russia did not win in Georgia. Indeed, Georgia lost this short war, but Russia also lost. I become more convinced of this the more I read and see what former Sovietologists have to say, Western experts who made colossal mistakes in overestimating the Soviet empire in the past, and now are again rushing from one TV studio to the next; again, they have something to talk about: The Russian threat.

The Russian threat? When a superpower needs to utilize brutal military force in order to punish a rebellious tiny neighbor, it does not prove its power – in fact, it proves its weakness. By invading Georgia, Russia proved that it does not even have the power to deter a tiny country from provoking it.

Those who think that Russia’s neighbors were scared by the sight of 50 airplanes and 100 tanks pushing the Georgian army out of south Ossetia and Abkhazia are wrong. “Conquering” Ossetia is not the same as conquering Ukraine.

Whether Plocker is right or not depends, of course, on what happens next, in other former Soviet republics. For more than a decade, Russia has continued to lose the Cold War, as nations increasingly adopt Western-style regimes and elect more pro-American governments. But even if the Georgia war slows this process a bit, it seems unlikely to stop it.

Unlikely, that is, unless the West encourages further belligerence by letting the Russians off the hook. The ball is now in the West’s court.