Russia and Georgia have agreed to reopen their major border crossing, officials said on Thursday, signaling the first thawing of ties between the countries since they went to war last year over a separatist enclave.
The crossing, at the Upper Lars checkpoint in the Caucasus mountains, has been closed since 2006, when relations began growing tense, in part because of efforts by Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili to align himself more closely with the US.
Russia also banned imports of Georgian products, including its popular wines, and cut air transportation links. In August last year, war broke out after Georgia tried to retake South Ossetia, a separatist enclave that has close ties to Moscow, and Russian troops responded by invading Georgia.
The countries have not had diplomatic relations since. The Kremlin insists that it will have no direct contact with Saakashvili, but it has lately expressed more willingness to lessen the pressure on Georgia.
Russian president Dmitri Medvedev said this month that he was not opposed to restoring air links, though he did not formally propose doing so. A Georgian airline said this week that it would apply to the Russian authorities for permission to fly to Moscow from Tbilisi, the Georgian capital.
The pass at Upper Lars is the only legal highway crossing between Russia and territory controlled by Georgia, officials said. There are also crossings in South Ossetia and Abkhazia.
The Upper Lars crossing links Tbilisi with the Russian city of Vladikavkaz, and reopens the only direct route from Russia to Armenia, Georgia’s neighbor to the south.
The agreement to open the border was mediated by Swiss diplomats. While it suggested some progress in relations, other events have underscored the tensions.
Georgia demolished a World War II memorial this month in the city of Kutaisi to make way for a [arliament building, causing an outcry in Russia, which called the move sacrilegious.
“This is one more attempt to erase the history of the peoples of the former Soviet Union, including the heroic history, from historical memory,” Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said on Wednesday.
He suggested that the monument be rebuilt in Moscow.
The Georgian Foreign Ministry released a statement saying the Georgian government revered the memory of World War II veterans but noted that the memorial was damaged and needed extensive renovation. It also said that Russia had the “immoral habit of permanently interfering in other countries’ internal affairs.”
For Russian officials, the status of such war memorials in other former Soviet republics is a delicate subject. Relations between Russia and Estonia were enflamed in 2007 when the Estonian authorities moved a prominent memorial.
The Georgia monument also turned into a domestic scandal after a young woman and her daughter were killed in the demolition blast.
AFGHAN CHILD: A court battle is ongoing over if the toddler can stay with Joshua Mast and his wife, who wanted ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ for her Major Joshua Mast, a US Marine whose adoption of an Afghan war orphan has spurred a years-long legal battle, is to remain on active duty after a three-member panel of Marines on Tuesday found that while he acted in a way unbecoming of an officer to bring home the baby girl, it did not warrant his separation from the military. Lawyers for the Marine Corps argued that Mast abused his position, disregarded orders of his superiors, mishandled classified information and improperly used a government computer in his fight over the child who was found orphaned on the battlefield in rural Afghanistan
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
EYEING THE US ELECTION: Analysts say that Pyongyang would likely leverage its enlarged nuclear arsenal for concessions after a new US administration is inaugurated North Korean leader Kim Jong-un warned again that he could use nuclear weapons in potential conflicts with South Korea and the US, as he accused them of provoking North Korea and raising animosities on the Korean Peninsula, state media reported yesterday. Kim has issued threats to use nuclear weapons pre-emptively numerous times, but his latest warning came as experts said that North Korea could ramp up hostilities ahead of next month’s US presidential election. In a Monday speech at a university named after him, the Kim Jong-un National Defense University, he said that North Korea “will without hesitation use all its attack
STOPOVERS: As organized crime groups in Asia and the Americas move drugs via places such as Tonga, methamphetamine use has reached levels called ‘epidemic’ A surge of drugs is engulfing the South Pacific as cartels and triads use far-flung island nations to channel narcotics across the globe, top police and UN officials told reporters. Pacific island nations such as Fiji and Tonga sit at the crossroads of largely unpatrolled ocean trafficking routes used to shift cocaine from Latin America, and methamphetamine and opioids from Asia. This illicit cargo is increasingly spilling over into local hands, feeding drug addiction in communities where serious crime had been rare. “We’re a victim of our geographical location. An ideal transit point for vessels crossing the Pacific,” Tonga Police Commissioner Shane McLennan
RSS