On 15 June the UN Security Council failed to extend the presence of the 16-year-old United Nations Observer Mission in Georgia (UNOMIG) because Russia vetoed its technical roll-over. The observer mission was active in the sensitive region of Abkhazia after a 1993 ceasefire between Georgia and the Abkhaz separatists, serving as one of the few deterrents of ethnic conflict.

Why would Russia want to end an observer mission consisting of 131 military observers and 20 policemen?
The website of the Russian foreign ministry provides an interesting take on the issue:

“There is no doubt that the full responsibility for the withdrawal from the region of the UN mission observers and staff, whose work was on the whole positively perceived in Moscow, Sukhum [Sukhumi] and New York, lies on the Western states which for many months in a row now have demonstrated ideology-driven recalcitrance. It seems they do not need UN observers, who would hinder the leadership in Tbilisi repeatedly using force. It turned out to be much more important to strive by hook or by crook to highlight in the draft UN Security Council resolution the existence of Georgia within the former, pre-August 2008 borders, and at the same time to wipe Abkhazia off the political map of the Transcaucasus, reviving the state of an ‘unsettled conflict’, which has in fact already been resolved.” (June 16)

The argument is essentially legalistic: the UN mission’s mandate in Georgia has ceased to exist because Abkhazia is no longer part of Georgia, according to Russia. Georgia and Russia intervened or rather clashed in South Ossetia last August, but for Russia the outcome was the independence of both breakaway regions.

Aside from the legalistic nature of the issue, and the great-power game, at stake is the future of the region’s ethnic Georgian population, numbering up to 60,000 according to AFP and concentrated in the region’s eastern Gali district. Analysts say the withdrawal of UN monitors from Abkhazia would leave tens of thousands of ethnic Georgians in the region vulnerable and could provoke a mass exodus. A mission of about 225 European Union monitors will continue to operate near Abkhazia and South Ossetia, but the EU has so far been denied access to both rebel regions.

A similar scenario played out on May 13 with Russia vetoing a Greece-brokered deal to save an OSCE mission in Georgia. After five months of talks revolving around the same type of legalistic sovereignty issues, Greece - the current president of the OSCE - floated a revised plan omitting mention of Georgia or South Ossetia, skirting the hot issue of the separatist region’s status, while stipulating free movement for monitors across the August ceasefire line. Moscow had a different version. According to Reuters references to “free and unimpeded contact and movement” across the truce line were crossed out by the Kremlin - a statement on the separate status of South Ossetia and Abkhazia.
registan.net quotes an International Crisis Group report on the situation in South Ossetia:

“All sides in the conflict – Georgian, Russian and South Ossetian – committed war-time abuses, but the actions of Ossetian militias, who systematically looted, torched and in some cases bulldozed most ethnic Georgian villages, were particularly egregious. The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) called those abuses “ethnic cleansing” Human Rights Watch cited ample evidence to label them “crimes against humanity” and “war crimes”. The PACE also noted “the failure of Russia and the de facto authorities to bring these practices to a halt and their perpetrators to justice”. Indeed, Russian troops largely stood by, unwilling or unable to perform their security duties…”

Registan.net also adds that on June 22nd Abkhazian forces managed to attack and damage part of Georgia’s electricity infrastructure - a disturbing occurrence reminiscent more of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict than of the more or less stable situation before 2004 (the year when Saakashvili’s government proceeded to break down the flourishing black market between South Ossetia and Russia).