On September 17, the de-facto Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) of the occupied Tskhinvali region issued a statement regarding the Georgian Dream honorary chair Bidzina Ivanishvili’s broaching Georgia’s apology to “Ossetian sisters and brothers” for the August 2008 war, saying that the message should be viewed in the context of Georgia’s pre-election campaign and that Tskhinvali expects the subsequent “practical measures” in the future.
The statement says: “We expect that this real step, attesting to the sincerity of the good intentions voiced by Ivanishvili, will soon result in a legally binding document of Georgia’s refusal to use or threaten to use force against the Republic of South Ossetia and the Republic of Abkhazia,” the statement of the de-facto agency says.
“In the period preceding the parliamentary elections in Georgia, the topic of Georgian-Ossetian relations will be used, one way or another, in the internal political pre-election struggle. However, the prospect of establishing relations cannot depend on the political situation in Georgia at a certain point in time,” the statement notes.
The statement concludes that the political vector of the occupation regime is conditioned by the need to “comprehensively strengthen allied and integration ties with the Russian Federation, which is the guarantor of peace and security in the region and on whose territory the majority of the divided Ossetian people reside”.
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