The EU must offset Russian influence in Georgia or risk seeing its Black Sea neighbour sink back into violence, Georgia’s foreign minister told EUobserver, urging the west to put values before pragmatism in its relations with Moscow.
“If we continue to drive the situation in existing formats, with existing actors and with the dominant power of Russia…we will end up in violence,” Gela Bezhuashvili said after meeting EU foreign policy chiefs in Brussels last week. “It’s a Cold War with elements of hot.”
The EU has played an unofficial diplomatic role in conflict resolution in the breakaway Georgian regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia since 2003, with the UN, Georgia, Russia and separatist leaders locked in formal talks since heavy fighting ended in the early-1990s.
The EU’s regional envoy recently said Europe will not recognise South Ossetia’s November pro-independence referendum, but Brussels has declined to send border monitors to the region due to lack of agreement from the Russian side.
Meanwhile, the past few weeks have seen relations put on a knife edge: on 3 September Russian-aided South Ossetian forces shot down a helicopter carrying Georgia’s defence minister. Three days later, Tbilisi arrested plotters in an alleged pro-Russia coup d’etat.
“We are basically initiating a process of change in the format, a change in the negotiating format, a change in the [Russian-run] peacekeeping operations,” Mr Bezhuashvili explained. “We would like to reinvigorate [the EU] role. To equalise the dominant power of Russia.”
The minister rejected any suggestion that the helicopter flight was designed to provoke a crisis, saying its “route was changed due to weather conditions” and adding “How can a country like Georgia, which is developing so well [economically], want violence to catch attention?”
Andrew Rettman