After three days of arguments at the International Court of Justice in The Hague, Georgian officials are feeling confident that their ethnic cleansing accusations against Russia will be found to have merit. Moscow has dismissed the allegations as groundless.
For four days, 68-year-old Meri Basishvili trudged through the woods of South Ossetia to make it from her home in Kurta, an ethnic Georgian village there, to relative safety in the nearby Russian-occupied city of Gori.
Diana Khidasheli and her four children spent the night before the August 8 outbreak of war with Russia in their house basement, hoping for an end to the intensive shelling of their village, Kemerti, in the Georgian-controlled South Ossetia conflict zone. Now Khidasheli thinks the decision to hide was a mistake. The next day, she had no time to pack.
Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili met for the first time on June 6 with Russian President Dmitri Medvedev. The two leaders provided no indicators that they had found a way to ease bilateral tension.
Georgian analysts see few grounds to hope that a meeting later this week between Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili and Russian leader Dmitry Medvedev will ease tension related to the breakaway region of Abkhazia.
The meeting has been tentatively scheduled for June 6 on the sidelines of the Commonwealth of Independent States summit in St. Petersburg.
With just over a week to go before Georgia's parliamentary vote, attention is increasingly focusing on how the country's television reporters are affecting voter sympathies.
With Georgian-Russian tension over the break-away territory of Abkhazia continuing to rise, the United States and European Union are stepping up diplomatic intervention efforts.
France's decision to grant political asylum to ex-Georgian Defense Minister Irakli Okruashvili, once one of Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili's closest confidantes, has sharpened an ongoing debate inside Georgia about the government's commitment to democratization. Preoccupied with a diplomatic crisis involving Russia, the Georgian government has not commented on the French decision.
