The November 6 incident on the state border between South Ossetia and Georgia was raised again at the 116th Incident Prevention and Response Mechanism (IPRM) meeting, held on Wednesday in the border village of Ergnet.
As Egor Kochiev, Deputy Presidential Envoy for Post-Conflict Resolution the Republic of South Ossetia for post-conflict settlement issues and the head of the South Ossetian delegation to the IPRM, said following the meeting, this incident became one of the central topics of the discussion.
When trying to detain the Georgian citizen who violated the border, weapons were used. As a result, he was injured and subsequently died. The South Ossetian party has repeatedly stated the need to carry out preventive measures that would prevent violations of the state border,” Kochiev said.
He has noted that, in particular, it was in the area of the village of Grom that border violations were repeatedly recorded. According to the Deputy Envoy, at the 116th meeting he presented statistics on violations from 2020 until now. .
“There are no such number of state border violations as in the area of the settlement of Grom, where the incident occurred, along the entire border line between South Ossetia and Georgia. That is, the volume of violations and provocative actions by the Georgian side in this area is very large,” added the head of the delegation.
Kochiev has emphasized that the South Ossetian delegation voiced these problems via the hotline and at face-to-face meetings and pointed out the need to inform the population by the Georgian side that their illegal actions could lead to serious consequences.
“Unfortunately, my warnings and hotline activations were ignored by the Georgian party, which led to the incident happened in November. If the Georgian side had a more responsible approach to working with the border population, this would not have happened,” he said.
The Deputy Presidential Envoy also commented on the use of weapons by the border guards, emphasizing that they acted strictly according to the instructions adopted in most countries of the world. The same answer, according to him, was given to the Georgian party.
