A shot of a tape made on board of Georgia's drone hit in Abkhazia's air
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UN Got On Russia’s Track
UN mission in Georgia blamed on Russia the destruction of Georgia’s spy drone in Abkhazia’s air April 20. Based on that conclusion, Tbilisi again referred to Russia as to the conflict party rather than its intermediary and called for the urgent replacement of Russia’s peacekeepers in Abkhazia. Official Moscow denies the involvement, but some members of the State Duma leave room for such possibility.
The yesterday’s statement of the UN experts advanced the dispute around the destruction of Georgia’s spy drone to a new level. The conclusion says the tape provided by Georgia shows either MiG-29 or Su-27. The radars first spotted the jet at roughly 12 kilometers from Gudauta airport, Abkhazia, at the altitude of 2,800 meters, i.e. it could have taken off exactly from that airport. Having hit the drone, the jet flew back to Russia’s air space and headed for the Maikop-Krasnodar line, the experts specified.
Once the conclusion was ready, the UN lashed out at Russia blaming on it violation of cease-fire agreement coupled with the recent strengthening of peacekeepers contingent in Abkhazia.
Russia’s Defense Ministry bluntly denied the involvement. “Any violation of Georgia’s state border, the more so hitting its drone is completely out of the question,” said Colonel Alexander Drobyshevsky, who heads the press service of Defense Ministry.
In the RF parliament, however, they don’t completely cross out the possibility of Russia’s involvement. “More likely than not, it was Russia’s jet,” Gennady Gudkov said yesterday, calling on the authorities “not to react to the UN conclusions.” Gudkov is the deputy head at State Duma’s Security Committee.
But it appears that Moscow will have to explain in the end, at least Slovenia's Minister of Foreign Affairs Dimitri Rupel voiced exactly that demand Monday on behalf of EU, where Slovenia presides nowadays.
www.kommersant.com
All the Article in Russian as of May 27, 2008
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