"Our banner has been transported to Batumi"

Russia abolished its military headquarters in Tbilisi

Today at noon, the commander of the Group of Russian Forces in Transcaucasia (GRVZ), Major General Andrei Popov, will be the last of the Russian military to leave Tbilisi and head to Batumi. From now on until the completion of the base withdrawal process in 2008, a management group of 13 officers will operate in the capital of Adjara. The 85-year era of existence of the Transcaucasian Military District, which in 1992 was transformed into the GRVZ, has ended .

In October, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov decided to close the garrison in Tbilisi two years earlier than planned. This statement was made after a spy scandal when Georgia arrested four Russian military personnel at the end of September. It became unsafe to serve in Tbilisi. The size of the garrison was systematically reduced, although as recently as this month there were 387 military personnel (in total there are 2,032 military personnel in the GRVZ) and 484 civilians serving in Tbilisi.

“After December 25, not a single Russian military man will remain in Tbilisi,” Colonel Vladimir Kuparadze, deputy commander of the GRVZ, told Vremya Novostei. “The group’s banner has been transported to Batumi, to the 12th Russian military base.” After the decision of Sergei Ivanov from Tbilisi approximately one hundred units of equipment and 350 tons of property and ammunition were taken to Russia and Armenia, to the 102nd base in Gyumri. Since 2007, Andrei Popov will visit Tbilisi once a month to discuss operational issues of the withdrawal of the 12th base from Batumi and. 62nd from Akhalkalaki.

On Saturday, the group's 10-story headquarters building was handed over to the Georgian Ministry of Defense. The fate of the building has not yet been determined. The headquarters was located between the two most prestigious districts of Tbilisi, Vake and Saburtalo. It is unlikely that it will be preserved as a memory of the past, and such an exhibit simply will not fit in the Museum of Occupation, created in Tbilisi this year. Most likely, the building will be sold at auction to investors: either it will be converted into a hotel, or a high-rise building will be built on this site.

Georgian politicians call the closure of the headquarters a “historic event.” The chairman of the parliamentary committee on science and education, Nodar Grigalashvili, surpassed his colleagues when a few months ago he compared the Russian military to “snakes” that “appeared in Georgia from behind the Caucasus mountains two hundred years ago and must crawl back.”

Mikhail VIGNANSKY,