Russia FM official to Georgia to organise Tbilisi-Tskhinvali talks

TBILISI, August 7 (Itar-Tass) - Russian Foreign Ministry's Ambassador at Large, Co-Chairman of the Russian part of the Joint Control Commission (JCC) on the South Ossetian conflict settlement Yuri Popov is arriving in Georgia on Thursday. He will arrive by plane from Moscow to Tbilisi in the morning and will hold in the Georgian capital a meeting with Georgian State Minister for Reintegration, the country president's special envoy for conflict settlement Temuri Yakobashvili.
Yakobashvili several times stated on Wednesday that he will go to
Tskhinvali together with Popov on Thursday where he will hold a bilateral meeting with Vice Prime Minister of South Ossetia Boris Chochiyev at the headquarters of the Joint Peacekeeping Force (JPKF).
However, on Wednesday evening, the staff of the South Ossetian part of the JCC circulated in Tskhinvali a statement saying that the South Ossetian side is refusing from the bilateral talks on the grounds that the "proposal on the bilateral meeting is unacceptable, because from August 1 the Georgian side started military aggression against South Ossetia." The South Ossetian side proposed to hold in Tskhinvali on August 9 a meeting in the four-sided format of the JCC.