President of Georgia is going to leave for Moscow on July 21. Besides his visit to participate in the CIS summit, Saakashvili is also going to meet with Putin one more time. This meeting was initiated by the Georgian president. The Russian president agreed to meet him like he did a month ago in St. Petersburg. A Georgian analyzer once noted that he had no reason to reject that meeting; Putin says that it is his pleasure to talk with Saakashvili, but he isn’t making any compromises.
There is no longer any doubt that this meeting is going to be the last attempt of the presidents not to start a “cold war”. Despite that, the two countries are already in a “cold war”. Things haven’t been going good for Georgian-Russian relations for a while now. Russia closed its border with Georgia without notifying beforehand, not taking into account the fact that it created more difficulties for Armenia than for Georgia. As for Georgia, it denied that the country had supported the movement of Russia towards the WTO (World Trade Organization). In response to that, Russia announced that conflicts should be settled with all the conflicting sides. Georgia organized a parliamentary session, as a result of which it decided that the presence of the Russian military troops in Georgia was illegal. Russia pretended that it didn’t care about the mentioned decision of the Georgian parliament; “Peacekeeping troops will do their work and there may be some changes in their functions, in case of need,” said Russian defense minister Sergey Ivanov. “This is an occupation for sure”, cried Georgians in Tbilisi and asked for help from the international community. The leaders of the G8 were taking part in the G8 summit at the time. In the course of one week, there were many terrors in Ossetia killing many people. “Do you see what is happening there? And after all this they want us to take our peacekeeping troops out of their territory”, this was what the leaders of the world’s biggest countries were told, hinting the fact that Georgia was improving its army with the purpose of settling the Abkhazian and Osetian conflicts through war. I must confess that the Georgian authorities have done enough to make such assumptions. First, Georgian defense minister Irakli Okruashvili said that he didn’t care about what the international community thought; they had lost territories and their goal was to return those territories. Second, Saakashvili said in the presence of foreign diplomats that the Georgian army might have a trial soon. Then he said that all territorial conflicts would be settled peacefully, but that this didn’t cover the first one, but rather followed it. As for the mentioned announcements during the G8 summit, Putin said that the situation in Southern Osetia was very critical, there were Russian citizens there and Russia was responsible for them…
Can Saakashvili and Putin reach an agreement after all this? Despite the fact that each of the sides shows its readiness to negotiate, they are hardly able to make any compromises; the only success they may have is to try to make the relations between the two countries a little better. The sides are losing their opportunities. Moscow didn’t worry about threat of Georgia to consider its military troops as illegal and leave the CIS. There are two things that Georgia can do now; it has to either start acting or “continue examining” the current situation and find out what kind of positive and negative results such actions may have. It’s been a while since Georgia declared Russia as a country that doesn’t support the territorial integrity of Georgia and has its part in the conflicts. As for the announcements of Russia concerning the significance of its support to solve problems and conflicts, they are only aimed towards raising its reputation in the international community.