Barroso at odds with some in EU over Russian pull-out

Some European Union officials have broken ranks with European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso, who said the EU should resume talks with Russia even if that country keeps soldiers in the breakaway former Georgian provinces of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. After a meeting in Brussels with Lithuanian Prime Minister Gediminas Kirkilas, Barroso said, “The decision of the European Council was not to go on with the talks on a new agreement with Russia before Russian troops withdraw from their positions inside Georgia, with the exception of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, because they were already there.”

That led officials in some EU countries to snap back that shouldn’t be the bloc’s position and that the EU should not restart talks on a partnership agreement with Russia until it pulls some 4,000 extra troops out of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, sources from a number of member states said.“Talks on the Partnership and Cooperation Agreement (PCA) should not be opened before the Russian troops have decreased their numbers, including in South Ossetia and Abkhazia,” an EU diplomat, who asked to remain anonymous, told Deutsche Presse-Agentur (dpa.) The disagreement concerns the exact meaning of the decision reached by EU heads of state and government at an emergency September 1 summit on the Russian-Georgian war, which broke out on August 7.
On that occasion, EU leaders agreed that “until (Russian) troops have withdrawn to the positions held prior to 7 August, meetings on the negotiation of the (PCA) will be postponed.” On September 8, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, the current holder of the EU’s rotating presidency, flew to Moscow and brokered a deal under which Russian troops would pull out of all of Georgia except for the separatist regions, and be replaced with EU ceasefire monitors. Barroso also attended those talks. If Russia lived up to the pull-out pledge, the EU could re-open the PCA talks, Sarkozy said at the time. But one day later Russia announced that it was going to more than double the number of troops it maintains in the two separatist regions, whose independence it recognised on August 26, to 7,600. Prior to the conflict, Russia had maintained some 3,500 peacekeepers under international mandate in the regions.
Moscow’s move sparked outrage within the EU, with some member states saying that the bloc should refuse to re-open PCA talks until the extra troops were returned to their barracks. “The EU highlights the importance that Russian forces should pull back from the buffer zones and also Abkhazia and South Ossetia,” Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt said at a meeting with EU foreign ministers. “Nowhere has the EU said that it would accept it if Russia doubles its forces in South Ossetia and Abkhazia,” he said. The EU is now expected to return to the question at a meeting of foreign ministers on October 13 and a summit two days later.
“That’s the crucial question, and it’s a hugely sensitive one,” one national diplomat acknowledged. The PCA is intended as a binding contract between the EU and Russia covering relations on issues as diverse as trade, energy, education and tourism, and some EU officials reportedly said they feared Russia would gain de facto acceptance of its aggression if the EU didn’t insist on removal of the extra troops, whose presence has infuriated some western countries, who said it violates the agreement Sarkozy reached with Russian President Dimitry Medvedev. NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer blamed oversights in the September 8 deal for not demanding the full withdrawal of Russian troops to their bases in Russia.
“If the Russians are staying in South Ossetia with so many forces, I do not consider this as a return to the status quo,” Scheffer told the Financial Times newspaper. “The option of keeping Russian forces in South Ossetia and Abkhazia is not acceptable,” he added. But Barroso said the EU preferred to maintain dialogue with Russia while at the same time expressing strong condemnation for its role in the conflict and its subsequent decision to recognize the two Georgian regions as independent states. “If the Russians respect their commitments, we can of course discuss the future of our relationship. That was the decision unanimously taken by member states on September 1,” Barroso said. His comments came just hours after Medvedev signed friendship treaties Abkhazia and South Ossetia and promised them the backing of Russia’s armed forces in case of need. EU foreign ministers endorsed an EU ceasefire observers’ mission to Georgia but said it will not be deployed to the breakaway regions for the time being, leaving the EU exposed to accusations that it is implicitly accepting a partition of Georgia.