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Thursday,
August 16,
2007, #156 (1423)
By Eter Tsotniashvili "We have requested that Russia provide its air traffic records and cooperate in order to find out what happened on August 6," Davit Dondua, a Foreign Ministry representative, said. Russian Ambassador to Georgia Vyacheslav Kovalenko, Dondua continued, visited the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and confirmed that the Russian side is ready to cooperate by handing over radar records and contributing its own experts to the investigation. While welcoming the radar records from Russia, State Minister for Conflict Resolution Davit Bakradze pointed out that the Georgian side has completed its investigation-data provided by Russia will be merely additional information, he said. Georgian investigators claim to have conclusive evidence that Russian aircraft violated Georgian airspace and dropped a Raduga Kh-58 missile outside the village of Tsitelubani, near the South Ossetian conflict zone. Military experts from the US, Latvia, Lithuania and Sweden arrived in Tbilisi on August 13 to begin an independent, international investigation. The Russian team will presumably join them. New information about the incident surfaced today. According to the Russian Defence Ministry website, military exercises involving Su-24 aircraft were being undertaken at the time of missile incident by the city of Astrakhan, near the northwest shore of the Caspian Sea. Russia had previously denied any military training was taking place near the border but now officials confirm exercises ended on August 10, four days after the missile was allegedly dropped. Astrakhan is about 600 kilometers from the border with Georgia. Meanwhile, exchanges at a rhetorical level continued. Yesterday, the Washington Post printed a letter from Alexey Timofeev, press secretary of the Russian embassy in Washington, entitled 'Unjustly accusing Russia,' a swift rebuke to the paper's Thursday 9 editorial which presumed that Russia was to blame in the missile incident. In the letter Timofeev accuses the newspaper of partiality, stating that the editorial "left the impression that there is overwhelming evidence to support Georgia's claims and that Russia is clearly to blame for the missile attack." Timofeev wrote that "Russia supports a bilateral approach to clarifying this situation based on unbiased information." Moscow wasn't the only side intent on pushing its story. In an interview
with CNN on August 14, President Saakashvili of Georgia stated he wanted
the world to respond to the missile incident. He called Russia's actions
in the Caucasus part of a "pattern of behavior," which he
suggested should be a matter of concern for the international community. |
Russia
sends radar records and experts for missile probe
