After the meeting of Putin and Saakashvili in St. Petersburg, politicians started expressing their opinions during a week and when doing so, they often state terms such as “effectiveness”.
Analysts note two things when speaking about this: first, there is difference between the understandings of territorial integrity that these two parties have. When speaking about the issue of Abkhazia and Tskhinvali, Saakashvili used the word “pressure”. In response to this, Putin agreed with the territorial integrity principle of Georgia, but said that when solving that problem they had to know what the citizens of the two autonomous states want. There is no need for further explanation. Besides that, the Russian president advised taking a look at what happened in Chechnya, when most of citizens voted to join Russia during the referendum. What should the Georgian government consider exactly? Do they mean the intimidation in Chechnya and the referendum that they forced everyone to take part in? The separated territories, indirect support provided by Moscow for powers doing things for their interests – these were the main topics for the presidents’ negotiations. As we see, the presidents didn’t come to an agreement after this meeting.
As Putin and Saakashvili said, they only talked about the embargo endorsed by Russia on Georgian products. They say that Russia is not going to raise its embargo on Georgian alcoholic drinks, agricultural products and mineral water. The Georgian president made efforts to solve the problem, but the Russian president said that they would raise their embargo only if Georgia had good control over product quality.
In a word, there weren’t really any results after the negotiations. Head of the Georgian “Right Opposition” faction, Davit Gamkrelidze, says that this meeting was just Putin performing “obeisance” before the upcoming “Great Eight” summit. “The West wanted Putin to meet Saakashvili and talk to him. He did that, in other words he did what he had to do. The meeting wasn’t good for Georgia. Moreover, after this meeting the Kremlin may look differently at Georgia and be stricter”, said Gamkrelidze to journalists, “Putin didn’t take a step back, he just clarified their approach to the conflict. I am worried over this and I think that Saakashvili’s announcement, saying that Georgia will not let anyone take its territories by pressure, was not aimed towards the conflicting sides, but rather Georgian voters. After the failure of these negotiations, the only thing he could do was PR”, said Gamkrelidze. One of the Republican party leaders, Ivlian Khaindrava thinks that the meeting didn’t have any positive results either. “This was just a meeting, after which neither of the presidents changed his approach”, he said. The proof is the fact that although Putin didn’t reject Saakashvili’s invitation to visit Georgia, he said that he would do what the ministry of foreign affairs thought better to do.
In spite of these two points, one of well-known Georgian politicians, Ramaz Sakvarelidze thinks that the two sides got something out of this meeting. “For instance when two people quarrel, their first meeting is already a good achievement even if all doesn’t end well. Neither of the parties changed their approaches, but we didn’t expect any solutions in St. Petersburg either. The presidents agreed that the problems should be solved, and this is a good achievement”, said Sakvarelidze to “168 Hours”.
But this point is very optimistic. Last week the Georgian government started making absurd announcements once again: the minister of defense said that a Russian plane had crossed Georgia’s territory, and the minister of police forces said that they had discovered the case of impingement organized against oppositional MP Koba Davitashvili and added that it was organized by the Russian “special services”.
In other words, there is still tension and as they say in Odessa-we don’t know what will happen.