Tbilisi Condemns Russia’s Move to Increase Troops in Abkhazia

Georgian top officials have denied deploying extra troops in the Abkhaz conflict zone and condemned Russia’s decision to increase level of their peacekeeping forces there.

“Any attempts to increase the so called peacekeeping contingent without agreement with the Georgian authorities will be categorically unacceptable for Georgia,” Nino Burjanadze, the Georgian Parliamentary Chairperson, said on April 29. “It will mean the violation of all norms; it will mean direct attempt to annex Georgia’s territories and legalization of Russian military presence there in the form of its peacekeeping forces. I hope that the international community will have more adequate and tough reaction on it and the increase of peacekeeping forces will not be allowed,”

She also said that Georgia as “a country, which is not interested in the war,” would have been itself interested in having move Russian peacekeepers in the conflict zone “if they really were peacekeepers.”

“But when we talk about the so called Russian peacekeepers, which are not peacekeepers, who are not neutral and in fact represent a party in the conflict, when they say that they are there to protect Russian citizens, everything is already clear,” she added.          

“We do not plan any military confrontation, but we also do not plan to dance under Russia’s tunes, because they are aggressors and they have no political, legal or moral right to speak about peacekeeping operation and this is cynicism and nothing more,” Giorgi Baramidze, the Georgian state minister for Euro-Atlantic integration said.

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