The time for negotiations in Georgia's dispute with Russia over the breakaway region of Abkhazia is running out, and Georgia will soon have to decide whether it can still allow Russian troops on its territory, Georgia's foreign minister said Tuesday.
"The time frame is very restricted in one way. The situation has escalated already in a way that positive changes are extremely necessary now," Foreign Minister Eka Tkeshelashvili told journalists after meeting NATO ambassadors in Brussels, reported dpa.
"Is it logical for us to still give our legal consent to Russia's military presence under the mandate of the peacekeeping operation... which is not any more a peacekeeping operation per se?" she asked.
Georgia has agreed to postpone any decision on rejecting the peacekeeping troops while international partners such as Germany, France, Britain and the United States "engage in discussions" with Russia, but if the talks bring no results, the "only tool" left to Georgia will be to reconsider its consent, she said.
Such a move would leave Moscow with the options of withdrawing its troops from Abkhazia, or leaving them there and risking being seen internationally as an illegal occupant.
Abkhazia fought a separatist war against Georgia in 1992. A ceasefire agreed in 1994 saw Russian peacekeepers deployed in the province with Georgian consent.
But tensions have risen sharply over Georgia's aspiration to join NATO. On May 31 Russia ordered some 400 railway-repair soldiers into Abkhazia in a move which Georgian officials and Western observers condemned as a breach of the 1994 ceasefire agreement.
"If this policy continues, by the end of the summer they will have completed all physical work necessary for the completion of the annexation (of Abkhazia)," Tkeshelashvili said.