Georgia-Russia Fight Moves to Security Council
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UNITED NATIONS — Although a United Nations report confirmed this week that the Russian air force shot down a Georgian reconnaissance drone flying over a breakaway region of the republic, Russia is planning to tell the U.N. Security Council on Friday that the unmanned flight violated a cease-fire agreement.
The conflict between Georgia and the Russian-backed rebels of Abkhazia has become one of Europe’s most worrisome flash points, and a theater in which Russia and the West have squared off. Top Georgian officials have requested several Security Council meetings in recent months to air their complaints about violations of a 1994 separation of forces pact known as the Moscow Agreement.
At a private gathering Friday, council members are expected to discuss the finding of Tuesday’s report by the U.N. observer mission in Georgia. Based on the drone’s photographic evidence, radar data, and eyewitnesses, the report determined that a Russian air force MiG-29 or Su-27 shot down the Israeli-made Georgian Hermes 450 unmanned aerial vehicle over Abkhaz territory on April 20.
The Russian ambassador to the United Nations, Vitaly Churkin, yesterday called the report’s conclusions “conjectures.” The only factual finding, he told reporters, was Georgia’s breach of the Moscow Agreement.
“To try to make some political mileage, as I understand our Georgian friends and colleagues are trying to do, on the basis of conjectures on that report, and at the same time rejecting the only statement of fact in that report, to me is rather shaky ground to start one’s presentation at the Security Council,” the ambassador said.
The U.N. report stated that Russia itself acted in a manner that was “fundamentally inconsistent” with the Moscow Agreement and that such an act “undercuts the ceasefire and separation of forces regime.” Mr. Churkin dismissed as an “observation” the report’s finding that “over-flight of the zone of conflict by surveillance aircraft constitutes a breach” of the agreement.
That last determination, however, is disputed by European countries. “We don’t consider [such] flights to be a breach,” France’s U.N. ambassador, Jean-Maurice Ripert, told reporters yesterday.
