georgia

Life in the European Parliament often throws up some amusing surprises, but never more so than during a reception for the Polish-Belarusian community a little while ago.
 

The thorny issue of the missile defence shield is still live, and deployments of US patriot missile systems in former Soviet states close to the Russian border are starting to rankle with the Kremlin. Moscow will, of course, be aware of the policy of “encirclement” that it pursued during the Cold War, and the unsettling effect that it had on the west. Indeed, the policy brought the world to the brink of nuclear war when Russian missiles were deployed in Cuba in 1962.

In the context of NATO's rejection of President Medvedev's proposed European Security Pact, Georgian troops are to come under US command in Afghanistan. In order to prepare the Georgian unit for deployment in March 2010 and follow-on deployments, U.S. Marine Forces, Europe, are engaging in a training program called the Georgia Deployment Program-International Security Assistance Force or GDP-ISAF.

Next wednesday (Sept 30th) the EU report on the origins of last year's conflict in Georgia will be presented to the Council of Ministers in Brussels. The German newspaper Der Spiegel has speculated that the Georgian President Saakashvili will be heavily criticised, and that his government will be largely blamed for the incident. It had been widely assumed that responsibility would be laid equally at the doors of Tblisi and Moscow. If Saakashvili is held responsible, this is likely to increase the frequency and strength of the street demonstrations against him.

Tensions are rising in Georgia, as the country's military are accused of piracy and of breaking the so-called Medvedev-Sarkozy ceasefire agreement, brokered after last year's conflict.
Russian Foreign Minister spokesman Andrey Nesterenko has warned Tbilisi about the practice of seizing ships bound for Abkhazia, calling Georgia's behaviour “nothing other than outrageous violation of the Law of the Sea Convention of 1982 and acts of international lawlessness”.