Georgia: Putin Takes Swipe at Saakashvili

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.