MOSCOW. June 9 (Interfax-AVN) - The Sukhumi military road section crossing Abkhazia's Kodori gorge is open for vehicle traffic up to the administrative border with Georgia and makes it possible to resume patrolling of the entire gorge, Abkhaz Deputy Defense Minister Garri Kupalba said on Wednesday.
"The ruined section of the Sukhumi military road crossing the Abkhaz zone of the Kodori gorge has been restored, and traffic on it is open from today on, which makes it possible to resume patrolling of the gorge by UN military observers and Russian peacekeepers," Kupalba told Interfax-Military News Agency by phone.
"It is up to the Georgian authorities to provide security guarantees for resuming the patrols, which is supposed to be done in a few days," he said.
According to Kupalba, "the UN mission in Georgia has scheduled aerial monitoring of the Kodori gorge for next week." The decision of UN observers' involvement in ground patrols will be made when the monitoring results are analyzed, he said.
Joint patrolling of the Kodori gorge by servicemen of the CIS Collective Peacekeeping Force in the Georgian-Abkhaz conflict zone and UN military observers was stopped in October 2001 after a gang of Chechen warlord Ruslan Gelayev shot down a UN helicopter in the gorge. The incident resulted in the death of three crewmembers and five observers. After that UN military observers and peacekeepers were sending unmounted and automobile patrols to the upper part of the gorge, but stopped doing so in June last year, when unidentified men kidnapped four officials of the UN mission.