Saakashvili Meets Russia’s Deputy Chief of NSC

President Saakashvili met with deputy secretary of the Russian National Security Council, Yuri Zubakov, in Tbilisi on Thursday evening.

The meeting came week before the planned meeting of Saakashvili with his Russian counterpart, Dmitry Medvedev, in St. Petersburg on a sideline of an informal summit of CIS leaders.

“We had frank, issue-based and mutually useful exchange of opinions over the problems, which are source of concern for everyone,” Zubakov told journalists after the meeting with Saakashvili. “This is very important, especially ahead of the meeting between the Georgian and Russian Presidents. We understand the importance of this first meeting [between Saakashvili and Medvedev] and we understand on what about they will be talking, this is very important. We are all interested in positive results this meeting may bring.”

“The fact in itself that Russia has sent an official envoy to Georgia is positive,” Aleksandre Lomaia, the secretary of the Georgian National Security Council, who attended the meeting told journalists.

“The goal of this visit [by the Russian official] was to specify details of the agenda of the meeting between the two presidents. I can tell you that Georgia has conveyed to the Russian representatives those major issues, which led our relations into crisis; that is the April 16 decision, which in fact annulled Georgia’s sovereignty on part of its territory and another one is illegal deployment of [Russia’s additional peacekeeping] troops in Abkhazia. These are those issues, which the Georgian President thinks, should be resolved in order to make it possible to overcome the crisis and move forward towards the normalization of ties. I think that these problems have been understood by our Russian colleague and now we will wait for the meeting between the two presidents.”

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