ITAR-TASS News Agency
TASS
April 27, 2005 Wednesday 6:54 AM Eastern Time

Georgia adequate compensation for evacuated bases unlikely – MP

MOSCOW

Moscow should not expect an adequate compensation by Georgia for the
infrastructure of Russian military bases that are to be evacuated
from Georgia, the deputy chief of the State Duma’s defence committee,
Sergei Grigoryev told Itar-Tass on Wednesday.

Commenting of result of Tuesday’s Russian-Georgian talks in Moscow he
said “ill thought-out decisions could be made under pressure of
Georgia’s central authorities on accelerated evaluation of our bases
that traditionally play the role of a stabilising factor in the
Armenian-populated Akhalkalaki and Adzharian Batumi”.

The example of Iraq shows that “regardless of rhetoric of initiators
of this ‘demilitarisation’, a slightest vacuum of order and forces
that keep it on border of different cultures, religions and
ethnicities, can be used be extremists of different kinds for the
realisation of their far from peaceful plans”, the parliamentarian
said.

He added that the evacuation of the bases would “cost the Russian
defence ministry 300 million dollars as a minimum”.

Moscow can hardly expect an adequate compensation by Georgia for the
infrastructure left behind the bases, he said.

Grigoryev stressed that “it must not be allowed that Russian military
servicemen are again re-based in slapdash fashion to unprepared areas
al ensuing consequences for the sake of somebody’s caprices”.

The hasty pullout of Russian military bases from Georgia can “upset a
fragile equilibrium in the explosive multiethnic region, in which
interests of a whole number of neighbouring, Western European and
trans-oceanic states intersect and collide,” Grigoryev said.

Moscow has admitted a possibility of beginning the withdraw of the
military bases from Batumi and Akhalkalaki in 2005.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said after his talks with
Georgian counterpart Salome Zurabishvili on Tuesday that the
withdrawal “will be gradual and could begin as early as this year in
case accord is reached”.

Zurabishvili had said in interview with the mss media that the
Russian bases must be evacuated by January 1, 2008.