Moscow says NATO secretary general's statement on South Ossetian-Georgian border politically motivated
BRUSSELS. June 5 (Interfax) - Moscow says that the statement of NATO Secretary General Andres Fogh Rasmussen regarding the situation at the South Ossetian-Georgian border was politically motivated.
"I think that this statement was rushed and politically motivated. It is regrettable that NATO again got into a propaganda trap set by those Georgian forces, which can not
come to terms with the new reality in the region after August 2008," Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Grushko told Interfax in Wednesday.
Rasmussen said earlier on Wednesday that he criticized placement of wire fences in South Ossetia at the border with Georgia. "Building such fences is a violation of international law and of the 2008 agreements," Rasmussen told reporters. "It is simply not acceptable and we urge Russia to live up to her international obligations."
"The alliance is well aware that Russia is fulfilling its international obligations meticulously and acts in complete accord with the Russian-South Ossetian agreement on guarding the border jointly," Grushko said.
Grushko said that Brussels was also aware that fences were being built only at a number of potentially dangerous areas, not along the entire border. "It is done to prevent unsanctioned border violations by locals and to decrease the number of detentions and in some cases arrests among other things," the official said.
Grushko said that South Ossetia had repeatedly raised the issue of border and the necessity of its demarcation within the existing negotiating mechanisms, firstly within the Incident Prevention and Reaction Mechanism working at the South Ossetian-Georgian border as well as within the Geneva talks.
"Finally, it would have been possible to ask how pressing issues of the border regime have been resolved previously, including those related to the attempts of Georgian border guards "to improve" the border line," Grushko said.