SUKHUMI. Aug 3 (Interfax-AVN) - 10,000 to 15,000 Cossack volunteers are ready to help Abkhazia if Georgia sends it armed forces against it, a Russian Cossack leader said on Wednesday.
The volunteers "are not 18-year-old youths but fighters with many years of combat service experience," the ataman of the Don Cossack Army, Cossack General Nikolai Kozitzyn, told Interfax after a meeting with Abkhaz President Sergei Bagapsh in Sukhumi on Wednesday.
Colonel General Gennady Belikov, ataman of the All-Russia Cossack Association, and Lieutenant General Yevgeny Potapov, first deputy chairman of the Russian Union of Veterans of the Interior Ministry, were also present at the meeting.
Bagapsh told his guests about tension caused by Georgian military presence in the Kodori Gorge, an area in Abkhazia controlled by Tbilisi where local ethnic Svans have rebelled against the Georgian government.
"In case there arises a threat of aggression against Abkhazia from Georgia, Cossack forces will help the fraternal Abkhaz people," the atamans said.