Russian First Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Ivanov on Saturday accused Georgia of faking the alleged release of a missile from a Russian aircraft into Georgian territory, according to AP. Georgian officials said the missile, which did not explode, came from a Russian military aircraft that violated Georgian airspace on Monday. The incident occurred near the border with South Ossetia, a separatist Georgian region that seeks to become part of Russia. Russian officials have consistently denied that the any of the country's aircraft were in the area. Ivanov called the allegations a «theatrical show» aimed at preventing a planned meeting of a commission of South Ossetian and Georgian authorities to discuss the decade-long standoff over the region's status. «The authors of this theatrical presentation achieved their main goal _ they ruined the meeting,» he said. Georgia accuses Russian peacekeepers in South Ossetia of backing the separatists and Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili has vowed to bring the region back under central government control. South Ossetia broke free from Tbilisi in fighting in the mid-1990s. Since then, it has been de-facto independent, led by an internationally unrecognized separatist government. Small clashes sporadically continue to break out more than a decade after the end of the war. The missile incident raised the tensions between Georgia and Russia, which have been especially high over the past year. The two countries have long been at odds over South Ossetia and Abkhazia, another pro-Russian separatist region, and over Saakashvili's repeatedly stated determination to bring Georgia into NATO and the European Union.
