Georgia’s new government “acts pragmatically” and Moscow is ready to deepen economic ties with Tbilisi, “but not at the expense of betraying our brothers in Abkhazia and South Ossetia,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on February 25.
He made the remarks while speaking with students from Diplomatic Academy of the Russian Foreign Ministry in Moscow.
When during a question and answer session a student from breakaway South Ossetia told the Russian Foreign Minister that she wanted to hear personally from him reassurance that “no threat poses to the sovereignty of Abkhazia and South Ossetia amid warming relations between Russia and Georgia”, Lavrov smiled and then responded: “President Vladimir Putin has already spoken about this issue directly and unambiguously and I can only reconfirm it.”
“I think that emergence of this issue in itself is strange, because we have secured the possibility for the existence of the Republic of South Ossetia and the Republic of Abkhazia,” Lavrov said, adding that if President Saakashvili had managed to regain control over South Ossetia in August 2008, “Abkhazia would have been the next in line.”
He said that there were possibilities of achieving agreements with Georgia over Abkhazia and South Ossetia before the August, 2008 war, but those attempts, he said, were undermined by Saakashvili.
Civil Georgia
