Georgia Pushes for G8 Frozen Conflicts Discussion

A July 5 meeting between Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili and US President George W Bush in Washington is being seen as a last-minute push by Tbilisi to put Georgia's frozen conflicts with the breakaway regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia on the agenda of an upcoming G8 summit.

Both Georgian and American observers have underlined the meeting's significance for the July 15-17 conference, to be hosted in St. Petersburg by Russia, which currently holds the rotating presidency of the group of the world's eight most powerful industrial economies.

"From the Georgian side certainly one of the purposes of the meeting is to keep the conflicts on the agenda of the G8," Dr. Cory Welt, deputy director of the Russia and Eurasia Program at the Center for Strategic & International Studies in Washington, said in an email interview. "But it is also important for Saakashvili to keep the issue of conflict and -- more broadly -- Georgia's role in US-Russian and transatlantic relations on the radar screen in the lead-up to a meeting in which participants will try their hardest to identify common points of agreement . . .

Ambassador David Smith, a senior resident fellow at the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies who is involved in Georgia's US-backed national security reforms, described the meeting with Bush as a "signal" to the international community that the United States supports Georgia and its territorial integrity.

However, Smith rejected the idea that the meeting is intended as an aggressive maneuver against Moscow. "It is not an attack, it is simply a benign message," he said. "It is a simple statement: