Georgia-Russia spy plane row prompts OSCE mission
People stand with posters during a protest at the Russian embassy in Tbilisi April 25, 2008.
Credit: Reuters/David Mdzinarishvili
MOSCOW (Reuters) - Europe's human rights and security watchdog said on Friday it will send a special envoy to Georgia next week to try to calm tensions with Russia after the shooting-down of an unmanned Georgian reconnaissance plane.
Finland's Foreign Minister Alexander Stubb, chairman of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), said he had expressed his serious concern about the situation to Russia and called for calm.
"The first thing we will do, we will send our special envoy to the region on Tuesday," Stubb said at a joint news briefing in Moscow with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. "We are quite hopeful things will calm down."
Russia and Georgia clashed this week over different accounts of the downing of a Georgian spy drone over Georgia's breakaway region of Abkhazia, a stretch of land run by pro-Moscow separatists on the Black Sea coast.
Georgia said a Russian jet shot down the drone in a deliberate act of international aggression. Russia says Abkhaz separatists downed the unmanned aircraft and that the flight itself was a breach of international agreements.
Russia's ties with Georgia have been strained for more than a decade by Moscow's support of two breakaway regions, Abkhazia and South Ossetia, which broke away from Georgian rule after wars in the 1990s.
Moscow last week said it would forge closer ties with the two regions, which Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili has vowed to bring back under Tbilisi's control.
Russia has also been angered by a NATO promise to one day give Georgia membership.
Lavrov said there was no crisis in Georgian-Russian relations.
"The fact that Georgia's leadership is not able to establish a respectful dialogue with Abkhazia and South Ossetia but instead declared that it will join NATO to solve all its problems is seriously aggravating the situation," Lavrov said.
"We are firmly convinced... that the mechanical expansion of NATO is absolutely useless, counter-productive and detrimental in conditions where there is no longer a stand-off between different blocs."
(Reporting by Dmitry Solovyov, writing by Guy Faulconbridge, editing by Mark Trevelyan)
