The Russian Investigative Committee's charge that Ukrainian servicemen fought for Georgia in the August 2008 conflict in the Caucasus is a provocation, according to Stepan Havrysh, the first deputy secretary of the Ukrainian National Security and Defense Council.
“It looks like the Investigative Committee’s statement was a quite expectable step in a chain of provocations addressed to and aimed against Ukraine,” he told Interfax on Tuesday.
Ukraine refuted these accusations earlier, Havrysh said.
“We earlier conducted quite an in-depth inquiry into the possibility that Ukrainian citizens might have taken part in the military conflict between Russia and Georgia on the Georgian side and quite an in-depth inquiry into our military contracts with Georgia,” he said.
“Russia has been provided with information, which proves documentarily that Ukraine assumed an absolutely neutral position during the armed conflict between Russia and Georgia,” Havrysh said.
Before the conflict erupted, Ukraine had been pursuing active military-technological cooperation with Georgia, because no embargo was imposed on that country either by an international organization or by Russia, Havrysh said.
“Ukraine was not the first country supplying weapons to Georgia. Ukraine did not ship heavy military equipment to Georgia,” he said.
In addition, “it is obvious, for instance, that not a single Ukrainian serviceman in Georgia was involved in the conflict and armed actions between Russia and Georgia,” he said.
“There was a group of servicemen there, who were conducting joint exercises with Georgian military units, but they received a special telephone message at the beginning of the armed actions and were evacuated within two days,” he said.
“Therefore, I would like to assure you that all Ukrainian special services conducted inquiries coordinated by the National Security and Defense Council in Georgian territory, which showed that there were no Ukrainian servicemen there,” Havrysh said.
As for Ukrainian volunteers who could have traveled to Georgia to take part in the conflict, Havrysh said, “We checked all possible ways that could have been used to cross the Ukrainian border long before the combat actions and during them, and we did not find a single piece of evidence indicating that any of our citizens could have been directly involved in the combat actions,” he said.
Havrysh acknowledged that representatives from Ukrainian factories were carrying out maintenance and other work in Georgia a year ago. “There were not very many of them, and they were evacuated to Ukraine during combat actions through different countries on board two planes. They were not involved in any hostilities,” he said.
“Ukraine is seeking to inform Russia about its actions in this respect in a most open way,” he said.
Meanwhile, Anatoly Hrytsenko, head of the parliamentary committee on national security and defense, criticized Moscow for “inflammatory” statements alleging that Ukrainian servicemen were involved in the conflict in the Caucasus.
“In my view, law enforcement agencies should work for investigation rather than for advertising themselves, and such inflammatory statements stirring the whole world and causing suspicion toward other countries should not be uttered by high-ranking Russian officials,” Hrytsenko told Interfax on Tuesday.
The Investigative Committee within the Russian prosecution system said earlier that it determined that Ukrainian servicemen and at least 200 members of the Ukrainian nationalistic organization UNA-UNSO were involved in the conflict.
