The FINANCIAL — According to Civil Georgia, EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana will pay a one-day visit to Georgia on September 30 to hold talks with the Georgian leadership.
Solana will meet President Saakashvili, Interior Minister Vano Merabishvili, Secretary of the National Security Council Alexander Lomaia, as well as opposition politicians.
The EU foreign policy chief will also visit Gori and meet internally displaced persons.
Meanwhile, a senior EU official told Reuters on September 29 that an EU mission to monitor the ceasefire in Georgia has been fully deployed and has met Russian forces over the weekend to discuss their pullback from positions deep inside Georgia.
“They [the EU monitors] will be ready to begin the mission in the early hours of October 1,” the official, who asked not to be named, told Reuters.
According to the agreement signed by the French and Russian presidents in Moscow on September 8, 200 unarmed EU observers will be deployed in the areas adjacent to South Ossetia and Abkhazia by October 1. Russian troops, which currently occupy those areas, should withdraw within ten days of the EU observers being deployed.
Georgia wants EU monitors to also cover areas inside breakaway South Ossetia and Abkhazia in the next stage of deployment – something which is opposed by Russia.
“We are in talks [with EU representatives] in order to agree on all the issues. In particular, the EU initially said that the number of observers would be 200. Now this figure is increasing,” Anatoly Nogovitsin, the deputy chief of the general staff of the Russian armed forces, told Interfax on September 29.
Discussion about this post