TBILISI, June 14 (RIA Novosti) - Georgia and Russia should concentrate on rebuilding currently strained relations, the president of the South Caucasus nation said Wednesday after talks with his Russian counterpart in St. Petersburg.
Mikheil Saakashvili and Vladimir Putin met late Tuesday on the sidelines of an international economic forum in Russia's second city.
"The important thing to us now is to make the climate of our relations warmer," Saakashvili told RIA Novosti in an interview. "They have reached freezing point, and are in need of a thaw."
"Now our relations are in such a bad state that they just cannot get any worse," he said. "A flywheel of hostility is actually spinning in Georgia. We must halt this flywheel and set it off in the opposite direction."
Bilateral relations have deteriorated in recent months, in particular over the role of Russian peacekeepers in conflict zones within Georgia and a Russian ban on imports of Georgian wine and mineral water, ostensibly over health and safety concerns, although Georgia has denounced the bans as politically motivated.
Saakashvili described his latest talks with Putin as "enjoyable," and said he had always been "impressed" by the Russian president.
"The dialogue was suspended, but now we have resumed talking to each other. That's something very important to me," Saakashvili said.
But he added that Russia is a centralized country, where "everything has to go from top to bottom and sometimes does so quite slowly," which means it could take some time for relations between the two nations to get back to normal.
Speaking of the Georgian parliament's plans to adopt another resolution calling for the withdrawal of Russian peacekeepers from the breakaway South Ossetia and Abkhazia regions, Saakashvili said he could not predict what the legislature's decision would be.
Georgia's parliament has repeatedly urged the withdrawal of Russian peacekeepers from South Ossetia, and is now likely to call for the pullout of Russia's peacekeeping contingent from Abkhazia as well.
Saakashvili said the controversy over the peacekeepers was inextricably linked to the conflict surrounding the breakaway provinces.
"The [issue of the] peacekeepers cannot be taken out of the conflict context," he said. "I hope, however, that we will be able to make some headway toward settling the conflict, as part of an effort to improve the relations in general, and then the issue of the peacekeepers' withdrawal would take an entirely different position."
