"Russia is doing everything for China and India to recognise South Ossetia and Abkhazia" - Karasin

Karasin on the recognition of South Ossetia and Abkhazia

“The Russian Federation is doing everything to make China, India and other countries recognise the independence of Abkhazia and South Ossetia,” Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Grigory Karasin said during a visit to South Ossetia on 29 August to participate in celebrations marking the 15th anniversary of Russia’s recognition of it as an independent country.

In recent years Grigory Karasin was the representative of the Russian side in a permanent dialogue with the special representative of the Prime Minister of Georgia for relations with Russia Zurab Abashidze. The topic of the dialogue was ways of resolving the Georgian-Ossetian and Georgian-Abkhaz conflicts.

“This issue (of recognition by China and India) is not easy because the collective West, the US, is exerting pressure in the opposite direction. But I, being an optimist by nature, absolutely believe that sooner or later this recognition will come,” Karasin said.

“The main thing is the success of the policy of non-recognition of Georgia’s occupied regions” – reaction in Tbilisi

Chairman of the ruling Georgian Dream party Irakli Kobakhidze reacted to Karasin’s statement.

“We have already heard such statements, this is their business, I will not go into their statements. The main thing for us is that Georgia has been successfully implementing the policy of non-recognition of these regions all these years. The result of this policy is that the number of countries that have recognised the independence of the Georgian regions has not increased by a single unit over all these years,” Kobakhidze said.

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In recent days, several high-ranking Russian officials have spoken out about expanding support for Abkhazia and South Ossetia.

On 26 August, Deputy Chairman of the Russian Security Council and former President Dmitry Medvedev expressed hope in an interview with the state-run TASS news agency that “the Georgian government will be pragmatic enough to recognise South Ossetia and Abkhazia”.

He also expressed confidence that relations between Georgia and Russia will improve in the near future.

Three days earlier, on 23 August, Dmitry Medvedev published an article in which he threatened Georgia to annex these territories to Russia.

He stated that “Georgia has been carrying out an unconcealed genocide of the Ossetian people for many years”. Speaking about the Georgian-Russian war in August 2008, Medvedev accused the Georgian side of aggression and said that “the purpose of this aggression was to return unruly South Ossetia to the borders of a hostile state.”

In response, Abkhazian authorities spoke out against the idea of becoming part of Russia. Secretary of the Security Council of Abkhazia Sergei Shamba said that “there is no political force in Abkhazia that would like to join Russia”.

In South Ossetia the idea of becoming a region of Russia is popular. On 1 June 2022 they planned to hold a referendum on this issue. However, Moscow did not support the initiative, and then President Anatoly Bibilov cancelled the referendum.