Russian Defense Chief Accuses NATO of Selling Soviet Arms to Georgia
posted by zaina19 on September, 2006 as Imperialism
From: MSN NicknameEagle_wng (Original Message) Sent: 9/29/2006 8:14 AM Sergei Ivanov / Photo: AP Sergei Ivanov / Photo: AP Russian Defense Chief Accuses NATO of Selling Soviet Arms to Georgia
29.09.2006
MosNews Tensions over Georgia <NOBR></NOBR> boiled over at NATO-Russia talks on Friday as Russian Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov accused some alliance nations of illicitly selling weapons to the ex-Soviet country, Reuters said.
“Some members of NATO — shall we call them the younger generation? — are supplying Georgia with arms and ammunition of Soviet production,” Ivanov told a news briefing after the talks in the Slovenian coastal resort of Portoroz.
Ivanov did not name the countries, but he was referring to some of the seven eastern European nations that joined NATO in 2004. He said Soviet arms exports to the region were made under the strict understanding they would not get into the hands of third parties. “It means these countries are breaching world practice,” he said.
Russia began pulling out some of its diplomats and their families from Georgia on Friday as the small ex-Soviet state pressed spying charges against a group of Russian army officers.
A Russian Ilyushin cargo plane landed in Tbilisi to pick up some of the several hundred people working for Russia in the southern Caucasus country and bring them home.
“More than 100 people will leave today,” Russian ambassador Vyacheslav Kovalenko, himself recalled by Moscow, told journalists in the Georgian capital. He said a second plane was scheduled to arrive from Moscow.
Four Russian army officers, whose arrest by Georgia on charges of spying for the GRU military intelligence arm sparked the current crisis, were driven to a Tbilisi court in a convoy on Friday.
Relations with Russia, Georgia’s old Soviet master, have worsened dramatically since pro-Western President Mikhail Saakashvili came to power in the 2003 “Rose Revolution.”
Saakashvili’s pursuit of NATO membership particularly irks Russia. He himself has publicly attacked Moscow, saying it supports separatists who control two regions of his country in South Ossetia and Abkhazia http://www.mosnews.com/news/2006/09/29/badnato.shtml.
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