MOSCOW. Dec 21 (Interfax-AVN) - A four-day training session of CIS high-ranking military officials ended in Moscow on Friday.
The session involving representatives of general staffs of the CIS member nations concentrated on peacekeeping issues. It was hosted by the CIS military cooperation coordination headquarters.
Chief of the headquarters Army General Vladimir Yakovlev addressed the session summing up experience in peacekeeping activities in the CIS framework, Major General Alexei Tretyakov, head of the peacekeeping forces' section in the headquarters, told Interfax-Military News Agency.
Military officials of Azerbaijan, Armenia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan and Ukraine exchanged opinions on the most pressing problems of peacekeeping activity in the territory of the former USSR, Tretyakov said. They analyzed the progress of ongoing peacekeeping operations in the breakaway regions of Abkhazia, Trans-Dniestr and South Ossetia and summed up results of the peacekeeping operation in Tajikistan that ended in 2000.
"Despite minor differences in assessment of the operations, participants in the session came to the conclusion that the operations were an example of unconventional use of global experience in peaceful settlement of armed conflicts," the general stressed.
"The session helped coordinate positions of several defense ministries in relation to military aspects of the peacekeeping activity and outline unsolved problems in the sphere more clearly," he said.
According to Tretyakov, some problems are related to international law, while others are of military-political or financial-economic natures.
"The search for ways to overcome the problems, improvement of the legal base for peacekeeping in the CIS were in the spotlight of our session, too," Tretyakov stressed.