Georgia’s neutral travel documents and identification cards is “a trick” designed by Tbilisi “to deceive” residents of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, Russia’s Foreign Ministry said on February 8.

“These ‘neutral passports’ are not at all neutral in fact,” the Russian Foreign Ministry said, adding that Georgia was indicated as the country code on the documents and the Georgian Interior Ministry as an issuer.

It said that this “scam” by Tbilisi demonstrated once again “moral inferiority of a policy, which aims at pushing Abkhazians and South Ossetians back to Georgia.”

“Many years of suffocating blockade of these republics and barbaric military attack in August 2008 did not help the Georgian rulers to implement their plans. Now, they put stakes on cheating and promising various benefits. Just that is the essence of so called ‘soft engagement’ with Abkhazia and South Ossetia,” the Russian Foreign Ministry said, adding that residents in Abkhazia and South Ossetia were not keen to take those neutral documents as according to the Georgian authorities “only several dozen of such documents have been issued.”

The Russian Foreign Ministry also said that issue of allowing residents of Abkhazia and South Ossetia to take travel documents issued by international organizations was raised long before Moscow’s recognition of Tskhinvali and Sokhumi. “But it was Georgia, who blocked such a possibility and it largely contributed to mass requests for Russian citizenship from the residents of these republics,” it said.