RUSSIA AGAINST UN ASSEMBLY ROLE TO RESOLVE POST-SOVIET CONFLICTS

RIA Novosti
15:47 | 13/ 09/ 2006

MOSCOW, September 13 (RIA Novosti) – Russia is against involving the
UN General Assembly in the resolution of long-running conflicts in
the former Soviet Union, the Foreign Ministry’s official spokesman
said Wednesday.

The assembly’s general committee discussed September 12 an initiative
put forward by Georgia, Ukraine, Azerbaijan and Moldova to include
this issue on the current 61st session’s agenda.

Mikhail Kamynin said that Russia had spoken against this initiative
and most members of the general committee had supported its
decision. Accordingly, the issue was not added to the session’s agenda.

"We have from the outset been against politicizing this issue and
involving the General Assembly," Kamynin said.

Russia has had peacekeepers stationed in the conflict zones of
unrecognized republics of Abkhazia and South Ossetia in Georgia,
as well as the self-proclaimed republic of Transdnestr in Moldova,
since ceasefires were brokered between the breakaway and central
authorities in the early 1990s. Armenia and Azerbaijan have observed an
often tense truce over Nagorno-Karabakh, a region in Azerbaijan with
a largely Armenian population, since about three years of fighting
came to an end in 1994.

"Russia regards attempts to eliminate the existing mechanisms of
resolving the Nagorno- Karabakh, Georgian-Abkhazian, Georgian-South
Ossetian and Transdnestr conflicts as counter-productive," Kamynin
said.