The assembly's general committee discussed September 12 an initiative put forward by Georgia, Ukraine, Azerbaijan and Moldova to include this issue on the current 61st session's agenda.
Mikhail Kamynin said that Russia had spoken against this initiative and most members of the general committee had supported its decision. Accordingly, the issue was not added to the session's agenda.
"We have from the outset been against politicizing this issue and involving the General Assembly," Kamynin said.
Russia has had peacekeepers stationed in the conflict zones of unrecognized republics of Abkhazia and South Ossetia in Georgia, as well as the self-proclaimed republic of Transdnestr in Moldova, since ceasefires were brokered between the breakaway and central authorities in the early 1990s. Armenia and Azerbaijan have observed an often tense truce over Nagorno-Karabakh, a region in Azerbaijan with a largely Armenian population, since about three years of fighting came to an end in 1994.
"Russia regards attempts to eliminate the existing mechanisms of resolving the Nagorno- Karabakh, Georgian-Abkhazian, Georgian-South Ossetian and Transdnestr conflicts as counter-productive," Kamynin said.
