The Georgian parliament passed a resolution Tuesday advising the government to suspend peacekeeping operations in the breakaway regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia and take urgent measures to introduce international peacekeepers, the move Russia's Foreign Ministry called an irresponsible action.
Georgia's Prime Minister Zurab Nogaideli at a government session Wednesday ordered the Foreign Ministry and the office of State Minister for Conflict Resolution Giorgi Khaindrava to draft related documents to enforce the resolution.
President Mikheil Saakashvili said Tuesday the problem of Russian peacekeepers could be resolved when he met Russian leader Vladimir Putin
"We will make the final decision after my meeting in Moscow with President Putin," Saakashvili said, "We are coordinating the framework for the meeting."
"The final decision of the Georgian government and authorities will depend on consultations with our Russian partners. We are seeking much more intensive talks than previously," he said.
The leaders could meet on the sidelines of a CIS summit due in Moscow on July 21-23. A Russian presidential aide, Sergei Prikhodko, said earlier this week said that the meeting was possible.
"As to requests from Mr. Saakashvili, we always regard them with particular attention," he said. "The timing is another matter...We just have to fit it [the meeting] in the timetable of the summit."
Bilateral relations between Russia and Georgia have been strained in recent months over the role of Russian peacekeepers in the two breakaway regions, and ultimately over Georgia's aspirations to join NATO and leave the CIS, a loose association of former Soviet republics.
Putin and Saakashvili met last in mid-June in St. Petersburg to discuss controversial issues in bilateral relations. Both leaders did not come to any specific agreements but decided to work further on ways to resolve them.
Russia's Foreign Ministry blasted Georgia's resolution on peacekeepers pullout Tuesday.
"Russia considers the resolution as a provocative step aimed to escalate tensions, destruction of current negotiating formats and elimination of legal basis for peaceful settlement of the Georgian-Abkhazian and Georgian-South Ossetian conflicts," the ministry said.
The ministry said that Russia's position remained unchanged and the withdrawal of peacekeepers was fraught with a new crisis and humanitarian disaster.
Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman Mikhail Kamynin said Russian peacekeepers had played a vital stabilizing role in the region acting in line with a UN Security Council resolution.
And South Ossetia reacted angrily, with Murat Dzhioyev, the unrecognized foreign minister of the republic, saying, "The battle Georgia is waging against the peacekeeping forces is a battle against peace and against the people who live in the conflict zones."
Collective peacekeeping forces from the Commonwealth of Independent States were introduced in Abkhazia under an agreement of 1994, and joint peacekeeping forces entered South Ossetia in 1992. In 12 years, 112 Russian peacekeepers have died in the Abkhazian conflict zone.
