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Georgia cutting relations with Russia

Georgia will cut diplomatic ties with Russia over the Kremlin’s recognition of two Georgian rebel regions as independent states, Georgian Deputy Foreign Minister Grigol Vashadze said yesterday.

“We have received instructions at the Foreign Ministry and we will cut diplomatic relations with the Russian Federation,” Vashadze told reporters. “The final decision has been made.”

Moscow remained embroiled in a diplomatic war of words yesterday after Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin accused the US of provoking the conflict in Georgia.

Putin said the US administration had a hand in the five-day war between Russian and Georgian forces and drew a link with the US presidential campaign.

There were Americans in the conflict zone “doing as they were ordered, and the only one who can give such orders is their leader,” Putin said.

“If my guess is right, then it raises the suspicion that someone in the US specially created this conflict to worsen the situation and create an advantage in the competitive struggle for one of the candidates for the post of president of the United States,” he told CNN.

“They needed a short, victorious war,” he said.

“And if it didn’t work out, they could always put the blame on us, make us look like the enemy and against the background of this surge of patriotism, once more rally the country around a particular political force,” Putin said.

The White House dismissed the accusations as “patently false.”

Meanwhile, the UN refugee agency said yesterday that thousands of people had fled their villages in the buffer zone between the Georgian town of Gori and South Ossetia amid reports of rampaging militias.

Some 2,300 people have registered as internally displaced in the town of Gori and 800 of them are staying in a tent camp erected earlier in the week, UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) spokeswoman Helene Caux told journalists.

“The newly displaced in Gori all have stories of intimidation, including beatings by the militia in buffer zone villages,” she said.

“People talked about militias entering the villages, shooting in the air, harassing the inhabitants and looting their property,” she said.

Many of the new arrivals had in fact only recently returned to their villages after fleeing the fighting that erupted between Georgian and South Ossetian forces earlier this month, which was followed by Russian military intervention.

Caux said that some of these people have now returned to Gori “because they felt unsafe when they arrived back in their villages: they found their houses damaged and looted, their cattle slaughtered.”

She said a UNHCR assessment mission to villages north of Gori on Wednesday “confirmed that many returnees they met were traumatized and scared.”
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