Vorsitzender der nationalen US-Nuklearsicherheitsadministration besucht Georgien

Thomas P. D’Agostino, head of the U.S. department of energy’s national nuclear security administration (NNSA), will arrive in Georgia on Sunday for a two day visit, the U.S. embassy in Tbilisi said.
During the meetings with government officials, including from the Interior Ministry, he will discuss the U.S.-Georgia cooperation “on improving Georgia's capabilities to combat nuclear smuggling,” the embassy said.
NNSA has been cooperating with the Georgian Border Police and Customs since 2005 in frames of Second Line of Defense Program, designed to help U.S. partner countries strengthen the capabilities to deter, detect and prevent illicit trafficking of nuclear materials.
Since then the U.S. is providing Georgia radiation detection equipment and sustainable training for screening at airports, seaports and its land border crossings. “Upon program completion, an estimated 98% of trans-border traffic will be screened for nuclear and other radioactive materials out of regulatory control,” the embassy said.

Russischer Außenminister Lavrov: die Frage bezüglich Südossetien und Abchasien ist "endgültig und irreversibel"

The issue of South Ossetia and Abkhazia is already solved “finally and irreversibly” not only for Russia, but for “other serious countries” as well, Sergey Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, said.
“They simply can not acknowledge because of political correctness or some other political reasons,” Lavrov said in an interview with the Russian daily, Kommersant, published on June 11.
“I have said numerously that it was not our choice and all the complaints should be addressed to Mikheil Saakashvili, who trampled the territorial integrity of Georgia.”
Asked what did he mean when he said recently that immediately after the August, 2008, Georgia still had a chance to maintain possibility for restoration of territorial integrity, Lavrov responded: “When the purpose of the operation aimed at suppressing the aggression was fulfilled and the Russian President ordered to suspend a military operation, the Medvedev-Sarkozy plan was agreed, which laid the foundation for future actions. Its sixth point contained a provision on the need to launch international discussions over defining the status of Abkhazia and South Ossetia and ensuring their security. We have undersigned it. So, on August 12, 2008 the Russian President agreed that the status of these regions needed to be discussed on an international level.”
He said that from that point Russia was ready to continue discussions about the status of these two regions.
“The document was agreed. French President Nicolas Sarkozy took it to Tbilisi. Then he called and said that Saakashvili was categorically against discussing the status of these republics and that for him the status was in itself already obvious and this phrase should be removed [from the six-point agreement]. We agreed [to remove it],” Lavrov said.
“By the way, Saakashvili was also manipulating with other parts of the Medvedev-Sarkozy plan. Six points were preceded by a preamble, which said: the Presidents of Russian Federation and France approve the underwritten principles and call on the sides to fulfill them. In the document, which Saakashvili finally agreed to sign, he not only removed the phrase about the status of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, but he also edited out the preamble and is now saying that the document calls, including on Russia, to stop doing various things. The preamble was unambiguously saying that the two Presidents were calling on the sides to do this and that. That is why it is called the Medvedev-Sarkozy plan.”
Responding to a question about calls on Russia to fully fulfill its obligations under the six-point plan, in particular in respect of pulling troops to pre-August war positions, Lavrov said that Russia had already withdrawn its forces, which were sent during the war.
“By that time discussions on the status have been thwarted and revanchist statements, like the war is not yet over, were heard from Tbilisi , so by the end of August [2008] it was decided that there was no other way to provide the security and survival of Abkhazians and South Ossetians, rather than to recognize their independence,” Lavrov said.
“Currently Russian troops are stationed in both South Ossetia and Abkhazia are stationed there based on agreements between Russia and two states recognized by it. Russia has fulfilled the Medvedev-Sarkozy plan in this part.”
“By the way, those people, who say that we should return to the pre-August 8 line, forget that before August 8, 2008 our troops were stationed deep into the Georgia territory, because the peacekeepers were deployed not only in South Ossetia, which was then a part of Georgia, but also beyond its limits. The same situation was respect of Abkhazia. Therefore, if they call on us to move beyond South Ossetia and Abkhazia and to locate on the line, where the security was provided by our peacekeepers before August 8, 2008, I would be glad if we were told about it directly,” Lavrov said.

Ukrainischer Präsident trifft Außenminister Grigol Vashadze in Kiew

Ukrainian President, Viktor Yanukovych, met on June 11 with Georgian Foreign Minister, Grigol Vashadze, who pays a working visit to Kiev.
"We are eager to further develop cooperation with Georgia and our mutually beneficial trade and economic relations," Yanukovych said, adding that a potential for increasing economic cooperation between the two countries was not fully used.
"We believe that there are promising opportunities to develop our trade and economic relations and create favorable conditions for growth of the turnover between Ukraine and Georgia," he said.
Yanukovych also said that inter-governmental commission of Ukraine and Georgia should elaborate concrete steps on how to boost trade and economic ties between the two countries.
Ukraine was Georgia’s third largest trading partner with USD 502.3 million, down from USD 791,8 million in 2008. In the first quarter of 2010 trade turnover between Georgia and Ukraine was USD 127 million – the third after Turkey and Azerbaijan, according to the Georgian statistics agency.

US-Politiker Michael McFaul über die Obama-Politik des "Reset-Button" Gegenüber Russland: ‘Wir übergehen Georgien nicht ... wir tun diese Dinge parallel, aber wir verbinden sie nicht ... wir beenden nicht unsere Unstützung für Georgien ...’

It remains the Obama administration’s foreign policy objective “to end Russian occupation” of parts of Georgian territory, although there is no progress in pursuing this objective, a senior White House adviser on Russia said on June 10.
Michael McFaul, the U.S. President’s special assistant and senior director for Russian and Eurasian affairs at the National Security Council, has strongly rejected a notion that Washington was abandoning Georgia, at the expense of hitting a reset button with Russia.
Speaking at Washington-based Peterson Institute for International Economics McFaul laid out key principles of the Obama administration’s reset policy with Russia saying that from the very start of his presidential tenure Obama’s “principle observation” was that the dangerous drift in the U.S.-Russia relations, which started even before “Russian invasion of Georgia” in August, 2008, was not in the Washington’s nation interests.
He said that most of the central challenges of the U.S. national interests were not at all at odds with those of the Russian Federation, including on issues like Afghanistan, nonproliferation, reducing nuclear arsenal.
McFaul said that an important part of the Obama administration’s Russia policy was “to deliberately avoid linkage between issue areas that have nothing to do with each other” – for example, he said, it was not a precondition to negotiate START treaty for release of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, imprisoned former Yukos oil tycoon.
As another example he brought Georgia’s case and said: “We are deliberately not pushing for the end of the occupation of Georgia to resubmit 123 agreement” – a peaceful nuclear treaty with Russia.
When President Obama resubmitted the treaty to the Congress on May 10 he wrote in the message to lawmakers that “the situation in Georgia need no longer be considered an obstacle to proceeding with the proposed Agreement.” Remarks were criticized by Obama’s former presidential challenger, senator John McCain, saying that such stance was fueling sentiments that Washington “is selling” Georgia “out to Moscow as the price of our ‘hitting the reset button’.”
But as McFaul said the Administration’s strategy “does not mean that we are ignoring Georgia… We are doing these things in parallel, but we are not linking them.”
At the same time, he said, the Administration was not “allowing our Russian colleagues to link things that they want to link.”
“So we are not ending our assistance to Georgia [and] throwing Georgians under the bus in the name of UN Security Council resolution – that was a proposition put to us a long time ago and we said: ‘we're not gonna play that game’,” McFaul said.
After speaking about the issues on which he thought progress had been achieved with Russia as part of reset policy, McFaul then listed areas where no progress was observed.
“On the top of my list are Georgia and democracy [in Russia],” McFaul said.
“Is it a foreign policy objective of the Obama administration to help end Russia’s occupation of Georgia in a peaceful manner and restore Georgia territorial integrity? Absolutely yes; that’s the objective we have. We have other goals with Georgia as well: we have a goal of enhancing stability in Georgia and in the region; we have a goal of enhancing democracy and we have a goal of enhancing economic growth in Georgia and we are doing all those things simultaneously.”
“Have we made progress on that central objective? My answer is ‘no’; we have not; that’s the truth. So we have the goal, we have the strategy that we are pursuing and we’ll pursue that when President Medvedev is here [this month]. And have we made real progress in restoring Georgia’s sovereignty? My answer is ‘no’.” he said.
Also on June 10, the U.S. Department of State spokesman, Philip J. Crowley, told a news briefing in Washington that Georgia and in particular situation in its breakaway regions remained a source of disagreement between the U.S. and Russia.
“We still do not see eye-to-eye on all aspects of that,” Crowley said. “We’ve certainly not forgotten what happened in the crisis between Georgia and Russia. We continue to make clear to Russia that the situation needs to change. And we continue to support Georgia in terms of its territorial integrity and its rights in the region.”
He also said that Washington was “actively engaged” with Russia on these issues.
“Regional security issues are an inherent part of our ongoing dialogue with Russia,” Crowley said.