Mayor of Moscow, Yuri Luzhkov, arrived in breakaway South Ossetian capital, Tskhinvali, on August 31 to open a partially constructed new residential district for which the Moscow municipality allocated 2.5 billion rubles (about USD 78.5 million).

The residential district under the name Moskovsky is located on 60 hectare plot of land in the northern outskirts of Tskhinvali. A Georgian village of Tamarasheni from which Georgians were forced out during the August war was located in the north of Tskhinvali.

The Georgian Foreign Ministry said on August 31, that Luzhkov’s visit was a violation of the Georgian state border and norms international law.

It also said that opening of a residential district on the territory “of the now demolished and burnt Georgian village of Tamarasheni… is absolutely immoral by any standard of morality and even the Nazis did not think of building a settlement and naming it after Berlin on the territory where once were the villages of Oradour, Khatin or Lidica.”

“Luzhkov and his accomplices should keep a memory of the lessons derived from World War II that no crime will ever go unpunished and they too will have to answer for the ethnic cleansing conducted on the territory of Georgia, destruction of peaceful cities and villages and offences committed against each peaceful civilian,” the Georgian Foreign Ministry said.