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.
No one was injured in the shooting Sunday, but it underscored the
fragile ceasefire in the border patrolled by EU observers.
It also threatened to raise new tensions between Russia and the
European Union, whose eastern member states favour a suspension of
the bloc's relations with Russia over its war with Georgia in August.
Polish parliament speaker Bronislaw Komorowski on Monday called
for caution in accusing Russia, questioning the motivation of his
president's trip to the border.
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.
'There was no shooting from the Russian or South Ossetian side,'
Lavrov was quoted by Interfax news agency as saying Monday on a visit
to the Peruvian capital of Lima.
'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,' the minister said.
At a Tbilisi press conference immediately after the shooting,
Kaczynski said he did not believe the incident had been orchestrated
by the Georgians to make Russia look bad. He said he heard Russian
being spoken as the shots were being fired.
The Polish president cited the incident as proof that the EU-
brokered peace agreement between Russia and Georgia is not being
kept.
But Lavrov shot back Monday. '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.
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.
Boris Atoyev, the head of the South Ossetian security service,
said guards at the South Ossetian border had refused to let the
presidential convoy through but that no shots had been fired.
He said the convoy of 30 vehicles approached a border post in the
tense Akhalgori district - an area formerly under Georgian control
that has passed into a buffer zone around South Ossetia.
Georgia argued that the presence of South Ossetian guard posts in
the district is a violation of the EU-brokered ceasefire.
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.
Komorowski, a member of Prime Minister Donald Tusk's Civic
Platform party, called for an investigation into who on the Polish
side allowed Kaczynski's trip to the conflict zone 'without providing
for security.'
Georgian authorities need to explain why the trip was inserted
into Kaczynski's schedule, Komorowski said on Polish radio.
While the Gazeta Wyborcza daily couched Kaczynski's border trip as
well-meaning, it also said it aimed at 'provocation' that was meant
to shake up indifference to Georgia's plight and 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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