Russia tells nationals to leave Georgia: Tbilisi presses spying charges
TBILISI, Sept 29: Russia started pulling out some of its diplomats, military staff and their families from Georgia on Friday as the small ex-Soviet state pressed spying charges against a group of Russian army officers.
NATO, which pro-Western Georgia wants to join to the dismay of Russia, urged both sides to show restraint but said it had no clear role to play in helping defuse the row. A senior U.S. State Department official issued a similar call in Zurich.
More than 100 people were flown to Russia on two Ilyushin cargo planes, including embassy employees, non-essential staff of the Russian army headquarters in Tbilisi, which controls two military bases in Georgia, and members of their families.
Ambassador Vyacheslav Kovalenko, recalled by Moscow, also left on one of the planes.
Interfax news agency quoted him as saying that non-essential staff of the bases — in Batumi on the Black Sea coast and in Akhalkalaki in the south — would be evacuated soon with their families.
A Tbilisi court formally charged four Russian army officers, whose arrest on accusations of spying for the GRU military intelligence sparked the crisis, and ordered them kept under arrest for at least two months.
The hearings were kept behind closed doors and it was not clear whether the officers pleaded guilty. One of them, plain-clothed like the other three, shouted “this is a provocation” as he was led into the court building.
Espionage is punished in Georgia by up to 10 years in jail.
Interior Minister Vano Merabishvili released to media video tapes of confessions by five out of seven Georgian nationals, who were charged with high treason alongside the Russians.
The five looked fit and sounded confident when they spoke of their cooperation with Russian agents, who they said were interested in military, political and commercial information. Georgia’s pro-Western president, Mikhail Saakashvili, shrugged off the Russian evacuation.
“This was purely for public relations purposes,” he told Reuters. “Everybody knows very well that there is no threat whatsoever in Georgia for members of Russian families or for any Russians.”
Georgia’s relations with old Soviet master Russia have worsened dramatically since Saakashvili came to power in the 2003 “Rose Revolution” and launched a powerful drive to join NATO, which strongly irked Russians.
NATO TIES: The crisis in Georgia overshadowed a NATO-Russia meeting in the Slovenian coastal resort of Portoroz.
NATO agreed on Sept 18 to launch talks on closer ties with Georgia leading possibly to membership. But its Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer said after the Protoroz talks that the alliance would not get involved in the row.
“This is of course a bilateral issue between Georgia and Russia and NATO does not have a direct role,” he told a news briefing. “There was a call by me for moderation and de-escalation.”—Reuters
