The Geneva talks have been brought to “a dead-end” because of Russia’s “terror campaign” against Georgia, said Giga Bokeria, secretary of Georgia’s National Security Council (NSC), and also added that despite few results from the Geneva process, Tbilisi was in favor of its continuation.

Bokeria, who is Georgia’s chief negotiator at the Geneva talks, said late on July 12, that it was “very difficult to carry out talks with a party if in parallel to the negotiations terror campaign is ongoing.”

“We hope that this campaign will be ceased and we won’t have incidents like these and in that case the Geneva process will definitely continue,” he said while speaking at the Georgian Public Broadcaster’s program Dialogue with Davit Paichadze.

Few days before the sixteenth round of Geneva talks on June 7, the Georgian Interior Ministry said that it had foiled two terrorist attempts with one of them allegedly plotted by a Russian security officer based in Abkhazia and another one by Russian officer stationed in South Ossetia.  The Georgian Foreign Ministry said that there was incontrovertible evidence proving these allegations.

“We are interested in continuation of the Geneva process and we have not withdrawn from this process,” Bokeria said. “There have been interpretation as if Georgia is walking out from the process; what we’ve said was that if this [terror] campaign continues, this will naturally endanger the Geneva process.”

He also said that in overall “disappointment” with the Geneva talks was understandable for him.

“We have not received any tangible results, but our position has been and still is that it’s better to have a venue where discussions are ongoing no matter what the distance between the parties might be, rather than not to have such forum at all,” Bokeria said.

“There have been some attempts to create certain effective security mechanisms as a result of the Geneva process and that’s Incident Prevention and Response Mechanism; it is unfortunate that the Russian Federation was time to time boycotting this mechanism; but still it’s better than having nothing at all,” he said.

At the sixteenth round of Geneva talks on June 7 the participants agreed to hold the next, seventeenth round of talks four months later, on October 4 - the longest interval between two rounds of Geneva talks.