Moscow/Warsaw - Shots fired at the Polish and Georgian
presidential motorcade near the South Ossetian border were staged and
'yet another provocation' by Georgia, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei
Lavrov said Monday.
Georgia and Poland said Russian forces had opened fire on the
motorcade carrying Polish and Georgian Presidents Lech Kaczynski and
Mikheil Saakashvili on Sunday from the airport in Tbilisi to a
settlement near the Ossetian border.
'This is a real provocation. This is not the first time such
things have happened: They stage everything themselves and then
accuse the Russian or Ossetian sides,' Interfax news agency quoted
Lavrov as saying Monday on a visit to the Peruvian capital of Lima.
'Inviting a president for a celebration in Tbilisi and taking him
in a car to a different state - is this not a provocation?' he told
journalists.
'There was no shooting from the Russian or South Ossetian side,'
Lavrov added.
Russia recognized as independent Georgia's breakaway regions of
Abkhazia and South Ossetia after a five-day war with its post-Soviet
neighbour in August.
Russian troops rolled into Georgia to halt Tbilisi's push to
reassert control over the areas that have been autonomous since wars
of succession in the early 1990s.
President Lech Kaczynski, a right-leaning politician who staunchly
backs Georgia's cause against Russia, drew some criticism in Polish
media for his outing to the border zone.
The Gazeta Wyborcza daily called his border trip a well-meaning
'provocation' that was meant to shake up indifference to Georgia's
plight, but could have ended in tragedy.
'President Kaczynski's good intentions of seeking to help Georgia
could have triggered an enormous crisis, the biggest in our region
since the Soviet Union's collapse. Did Kaczynski consider that?' the
newspaper wrote Monday.
'His Sunday visit to Tbilisi was a hair-raising enterprise,'
Gazeta said.
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