Shots were fired near the motorcade carrying the presidents of Georgia and Poland on Sunday — the fifth anniversary of Georgia’s Rose Revolution — Georgian officials said.
No one was hurt in the incident.
Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili, who led the pro-Western 2003 uprising but whose popularity has waned in recent months, blamed Russian troops in Georgia’s breakaway province of South Ossetia.
“Frankly, I didn’t expect the Russians to open fire,” he said at a news conference with Polish President Lech Kaczynski.
“The reality is you are dealing with unpredictable people. They weren’t happy to see our guest and they weren’t happy to see me either,” he said.
Kaczynski said the shots were fired from only about 30m from the motorcade. He said it was not clear whether the gunfire was aimed at the motorcade or shots were fired into the air.
But he said the incident demonstrated the weakness of the French-brokered truce that ended Russia’s August war with Georgia over South Ossetia.
The truce, Kaczynski said, “does not reflect reality.”
“I know from their shouting that they were Russians; I also know from the president of Georgia that there are Russian outposts on that territory,” Kaczynski said.
“Fire was opened on Georgian territory and territory that until August this year was controlled by the authorities in Tbilisi,” he said.
The plan, brokered by French President Nicolas Sarkozy, called for Russian troops to withdraw from areas outside South Ossetia and Abkhazia, but they have remained in several areas controlled by Georgia before the war, including the area around the town of Akhalgori, near which the firing was said to have occurred.
The circumstances of Sunday’s incident remained unclear as night fell.
Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Grigory Karasin insisted that no shots had been fired and the Russian Defense Ministry, in statements carried by Russian news agencies, dismissed the Georgian allegations as a “provocation.”
South Ossetian separatist authorities also denied that shots had been fired in the area.
A spokesman for the Russian Defense Ministry in Moscow said he had no immediate comment on the Georgian claims.
Georgian Interior Ministry spokesman Shota Utiashvili said the shots were fired as the motorcade approached a Russian military checkpoint near the Akhalgori in South Ossetia. But lawmaker Marika Verulashvili said the incident happened as the motorcade approached a Georgian police checkpoint near the breakaway province after visiting a camp of Georgian refugees.
When Shanghai-based designer Guo Qingshan posted a vacation photo on Valentine’s Day and captioned it “Puppy Mountain,” it became a sensation in China and even created a tourist destination. Guo had gone on a hike while visiting his hometown of Yichang in central China’s Hubei Province late last month. When reviewing the photographs, he saw something he had not noticed before: A mountain shaped like a dog’s head rested on the ground next to the Yangtze River, its snout perched at the water’s edge. “It was so magical and cute. I was so excited and happy when I discovered it,” Guo said.
Chinese authorities said they began live-fire exercises in the Gulf of Tonkin on Monday, only days after Vietnam announced a new line marking what it considers its territory in the body of water between the nations. The Chinese Maritime Safety Administration said the exercises would be focused on the Beibu Gulf area, closer to the Chinese side of the Gulf of Tonkin, and would run until tomorrow evening. It gave no further details, but the drills follow an announcement last week by Vietnam establishing a baseline used to calculate the width of its territorial waters in the Gulf of Tonkin. State-run Vietnam News
TURNAROUND: The Liberal Party had trailed the Conservatives by a wide margin, but that was before Trump threatened to make Canada the US’ 51st state Canada’s ruling Liberals, who a few weeks ago looked certain to lose an election this year, are mounting a major comeback amid the threat of US tariffs and are tied with their rival Conservatives, according to three new polls. An Ipsos survey released late on Tuesday showed that the left-leaning Liberals have 38 percent public support and the official opposition center-right Conservatives have 36 percent. The Liberals have overturned a 26-point deficit in six weeks, and run advertisements comparing the Conservative leader to Trump. The Conservative strategy had long been to attack unpopular Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, but last month he
Four decades after they were forced apart, US-raised Adamary Garcia and her birth mother on Saturday fell into each other’s arms at the airport in Santiago, Chile. Without speaking, they embraced tearfully: A rare reunification for one the thousands of Chileans taken from their mothers as babies and given up for adoption abroad. “The worst is over,” Edita Bizama, 64, said as she beheld her daughter for the first time since her birth 41 years ago. Garcia had flown to Santiago with four other women born in Chile and adopted in the US. Reports have estimated there were 20,000 such cases from 1950 to
RSS