NEWS BRIEFS
11/20/09
Print this article
Email this article
Dropping any pretense of statesmanship, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin advised Ukraine’s pro-Western president, Viktor Yushchenko, to keep his tie away from Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili during the two leaders’ November 19-20 summit.
While university friends and Kremlin critics Yushchenko and Saakashvili were meeting in Kyiv, Putin told reporters on November 20 that it is in both men’s interest to take off their ties before retiring to dinner.
"Ties are pricey these days. It just may happen that ... you get my drift. Yushchenko’s guest will gobble up his tie," Putin was quoted by Russian news outlets as saying during a news conference in Yalta with Ukrainian Prime Minister Yuliya Timoshenko.
Putin’s comments were referring to an incident during the Russian-Georgian war in August 2008, when Saakashvili was once filmed nervously chewing his tie before a television interview.
Asked for his take on the Yushchenko-Saakashvili summit, Putin paraphrased a line from Russian writer Alexander Pushkin’s poem "A Song About Wise Oleg:"
Responded Putin: "The warriors remembered days gone by and the battles they screwed up together," the Regnum news service reported.
Posted November 20, 2009 © Eurasianet
http://www.eurasianet.org
|
The Central Eurasia Project aims, through its website,
meetings, papers, and grants, to foster a more informed
debate about the social, political and economic
developments of the Caucasus and Central Asia.
It is a program of the Open Society
Institute-New York. The Open Society Institute-New
York is a private operating and grantmaking foundation
that promotes the development of open societies around
the world by supporting educational, social, and legal
reform, and by encouraging alternative
approaches to complex and controversial issues.
The views expressed in this publication do not necessarily
represent the position of the Open Society Institute and
are the sole responsibility of the author or
authors.
|
|
Get RSS Feed
