Russia denies shooting, accuses Georgia of provocation
Posted
Russia's Foreign Minister has denied Russian troops fired at the Georgian and Polish presidents near breakaway South Ossetia but accused Tbilisi of deliberate provocation.
Georgia said earlier that a convoy with Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili and his Polish counterpart Lech Kaczynski came under fire from a Russian checkpoint.
Mr Kaczynski was in Georgia at the weekend to mark the anniversary of the peaceful pro-Western "Rose Revolution" that brought Mr Saakashvili to power five years ago.
"When the President invites people to some kind of celebration in Tbilisi and then takes a car and takes him to another state, is it not a provocation? Of course it was," Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told reporters in Lima, where he was attending an Asia-Pacific summit.
"It's not the first time that such things have happened. They organise everything themselves then accuse the Russian side and the South Ossetian side."
But Mr Lavrov added: "There was no kind of firing from our positions or South Ossetian positions."
It was unclear whether the shots had been fired directly at the convoy. There were no reports of injuries.
At a televised news conference, Mr Saakashvili said Russian forces "were not happy to see us and reacted in this barbaric way."
Tensions remain high in South Ossetia and in another breakaway region, Abkhazia, following a brief war between Russia and US ally Georgia in August that rekindled concerns of a new Cold War between Moscow and the west.
Russian forces had pushed into Georgia, a candidate for NATO membership, on August 8 to repel a Georgian military attempt to retake South Ossetia.
Under an EU-brokered ceasefire, Russian forces later withdrew to within South Ossetia and Abkhazia, both of which Moscow now recognises as independent states.
- AFP
Search for news
ABC News Online takes a look at the big stories from 2008.
