MOSCOW. Nov 8 (Interfax) - The latest "spy story" is a provocation staged by the regime of Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili in the run-up to a series of crucial international events, the Russian Foreign Ministry said in a commentary on Friday.
"The Saakashvili regime suffers from some chronic spy mania fueled by anti-Russian sentiments. In recent years, the Georgian leadership has resorted to fabricating similar scandals more than once, cynically hoping to earn political dividends inside the country and abroad," the ministry said.
"Evidently, their choice of a moment for this provocation ahead of a number of key international events was not accidental," it said.
"The upcoming NATO summit in Lisbon allows the Georgian authorities to draw attention to themselves acting through this scandal. It is difficult not to recall a similar instance of allegedly "successful exposure of radioactive material smuggling from Abkhazia" ahead of the nuclear security conference in the U.S. in April 2010," the ministry said.
"It is also obvious that at the OSCE (Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe) summit in Astana on December 1-2, the Georgian side prepares to give another portion of confrontational anti-Russian rhetoric, seeking to impose its vision of the situation in the Caucasus on its participants," it said.
"It is not a secret that recently such Georgian tricks have been met with ever-growing skepticism from the international community, especially after a report presented by the European Union's Tagliavini commission became another overwhelming confirmation of the fact that it was Saakashvili who started the armed conflict in the Caucasus in August 2008," the ministry said.
"Another evident goal of it [the arrest of suspected spies] is to use the "Russian threat" to maintain the country's anti-Russian hysteria," it said.
"However, this provocation will unlikely produce the effect expected by its organizers because the price of such propagandist tricks by Tbilisi has long been known," the ministry said.