The Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) said on August 9 that Tbilisi’s “hysteria” over President Vladimir Putin’s war remarks showed that the Georgian authorities had not given up their “revanchist plans.”

The Georgian authorities said that Putin’s August 8 remarks, that Russia had a contingency plan to counter Georgia’s possible attack more than one year before the August war and was even training South Ossetian militiamen as part of this plan, amounted to an admission that Moscow was planning aggression against Georgia long before the August, 2008 war.
 
The Russian Foreign Ministry said that in response to Tbilisi’s multiple provocations before the August war, Moscow had to draw up a contingency plan.

“Largely due to this plan it was possible to repel Georgia’s yet another military attack on South Ossetia four years ago, which was unprecedented with its scale and cruelty,” the Russian MFA said.

It said that President Putin’s remarks on this issue on August 8 “triggered a real hysteria in Tbilisi.”

“Such a reaction eloquently confirms once again, that [the Georgian authorities] have not reconciled with a failure of criminal adventure in August [2008] and they are still nurturing revanchist plans in respect of long-suffering peoples of Abkhazia and South Ossetia,”

“These plans are doomed to a failure, so the revanchists should better calm down,” it added.

Meanwhile, the Georgian Foreign Ministry condemned on August 9 a visit of Russia’s PM Dmitry Medvedev in Tskhinvali a day earlier and said it was a “violation of international legal norms and principles, as well as the Georgian legislation and particularly the Law on the Occupied Territories.”

“Kremlin must be aware that the international position on Georgia's territorial integrity is unshaken, while Georgia develops and looks into the future, where the torn social fabric of the divided communities will heal and in which there is no place for the occupying force,” the Georgian Foreign Ministry said.