TBILISI, July 23 (RIA Novosti) - U.S. Vice President Joe Biden has ended his trip to Georgia by visiting children whose families were displaced when Georgia attacked South Ossetia last August.
The U.S official offered children M&M's and Frisbee flying discs, and advised them to follow the example of Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili and to study a lot. Biden also apologized for not speaking Georgian and promised that the child who would show the best results in English would be invited to the U.S. to give him lessons of Georgian.
The Georgian president, who also attended the meeting, hailed the fact that the children use a diminutive form of his name, Misha, and asked them to be informal with Biden too.
Saakashvili also burst into tears several times when children were telling their stories about the five-day war in South Ossetia and said that the war was brought about by "a foreign invader," not by ethnic Ossetians.
Russia and Georgia fought a brief war which began when Georgian forces attacked South Ossetia in a bid to bring it back under central control on August 8. Two weeks after the end of the war, Russia recognized South Ossetia and Abkhazia, another former Georgian republic, as independent states.
Russian investigations into Georgia's attack on South Ossetia last August have found that 5,315 people were harmed by the onslaught, either killed or injured or having their homes damaged. Russian investigators have officially reported that 162 civilians died in the conflict, as well as 48 Russian service personnel, of whom 10 were peacekeepers.
