The relations between Russia and Georgia have gone too far. These last months party members are using different sentences to describe their relations, like: “Critical situation”, “On the edge of cold war”, “It is impossible to picture a worse situation”, etc. In several days it turned out that it was wrong: the relations between Russia and Georgia could be worse.
Last week, you could see a drastic change in the relations when the Russian embassy in Georgia stopped giving immigration visas to Georgian citizens. Before that, the Russian embassy used to justify this situation by pointing out some technical problems and saying that there are too many people wishing to go to Russia, etc. But this is not important because during their meetings they said that this wasn’t a result of the crisis of their intergovernmental relations, and that everything would be good in maximum two weeks. But it is worth mentioning that even in such conditions of unemployment in their country they organized workers to return Georgian citizens to Georgia from Russia.
Now, things have changed. There are no more technical difficulties. The press secretary of the embassy read a laconic announcement to the Georgian citizens stating that the reason for stopping the process of giving entrance visas to Georgians was the state policy of Georgia, according to which they don’t give visas to Russian peace keepers and army officers despite all agreements. This is the end, but it is not clear yet when the situation is going to be corrected.
Last week during the OSCE parliamentary session in Vienna the Russian vice-speaker of Duma, Lyubov Sliska answered to journalists’ questions clearly. On the base of what he said we can assume that Russia is already disappointed in the policy of Georgian politicians and the baseless, condemning announcements of the Georgian leader to Russia. In other words that say if you don’t do as we tell you to, then suffer the consequences.
Later definitely Tbilisi understood that everything had gone too far. The foreign affairs minister, Gela Bejuashvili announced that they would give visas to Russian peace-keepers and added that all the problems arose from their huge number. Saakashvili said that he hadn’t blamed Russia of exploding the gas pipe line. As for Nino Burjanadze, she had a meeting with Sliska in Vienna, after which she said that she was satisfied with the results of the meetings. But in spite of this the Georgian parliament remembered how to write letters and applied to the international community, where it described all the awful things that Russia had done to Georgia. Nowadays, everyone applies to the international community. This is the same Russian game, in where some were trying to involve us Armenians several years ago. I mean when the Russian president, executive branch of power are very good and want to have good relations, but there are some parliamentary factions and powers that try to do everything to make the relations bad. Now Tbilisi is playing the same game. Does anyone believe in that? Of course not, and it is a long time already.
Things are not looking too good for Russian-Georgian relations. If a country doesn’t give entrance visas to the citizens of another country, this means that they see potential danger in them. The next step after this is to call the ambassadors back and replace them with diplomats. This could also be seen in Europe before the WW II. We can be relieved with the fact that the situation is not that. But it may turn bad because neither of the parties wants to listen to the other one.
As for citizens, they don’t give a damn whose fault this is: they don’t care whether this is the fault of Putin or Saakashvili, Ivanov or Ivanadze. They are the ones that suffer from these changes. They suffer from visa regime limitations, as a result of which they can’t freely move in the world, which is stated and defined in the law of human rights. But this is a different story…