Due to heavy snowfall, blizzards and low visibility, traffic has been prohibited on the Georgian Military road - the only highway linking Georgia and Armenia with Russia. In the Daryal Gorge, on the North Ossetian section of the Russian-Georgian border, cars must not stop and movement is carried out only under the supervision of the patrol police. In fact, cars can only travel from Vladikavkaz to the Georgian town of Kazbegi and back.
Two-three weeks ago, the situation was similar - hundreds of heavy vehicles from Georgia and Armenia, transporting agricultural products to the Russian Federation, were trapped in the area of the ski resort of Gudauri. For a few days, drivers had to live in the cabins of their trailers and eat at their own expense. And so it goes on from year to year.
It does not add to the popularity of the "highway", if it can still be called so, especially among Armenian drivers. But unlike the Georgian carriers, who have the opportunity to deliver agricultural products to the Russian markets through Azerbaijan, Armenia has no alternative to this. And desperate situations on the Georgian Military road often form not only in winter, but in the heat of summer due to the heavy landslides peculiar to this region of Georgia.
As for alternative routes, recent events have put an end to the project of the renewal of direct railway traffic through the territory of Abkhazia from Russia to Transcaucasia. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and his deputy Grigory Karasin said that this issue is the subject of negotiations between Tbilisi and Sukhumi. But the Georgian side refuses to negotiate on this matter with the leaders of Abkhazia."This railway links two countries - Georgia and Russia. Therefore, we will conduct negotiations with no one, except for Russia," the Special Representative of the Prime Minister of Georgia for the settlement of relations with Russia, Zurab Abashidze, told Vestnik Kavkaza. According to Abashidze, his colleague in the negotiations, Karasin, "was not particularly focused on this issue" during the last round of talks in Prague.
Obviously, Tbilisi takes into account the interests of Azerbaijan. Baku is closely monitoring the situation around the "Abkhazian railway", and when Georgia is 100% dependent on energy supplies from Azerbaijan. An illustration of this political configuration was the meeting of the Presidents of Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey in Kars, during which the three leaders attended the ceremony of laying the foundation of the Trans-Anatolia gas pipeline (TANAP), which will allow Georgia to get even more energy carriers from a neighboring country, and a large part of it at a discount price.
In the media and the statements of officials a message was flashed about the possible construction of an Avar-Kakheti highway from Dagestan to the eastern Georgian province of Kakheti, but Georgian society opposed the construction of a new communication link through the troubled North Caucasus regions, and then all the talk on this subject ceased. Incidentally, in the last years of the Soviet Union the construction of a railroad through Ingushetia was seriously considered, but few people remember it now.
The situation in the area of communications confirms that the problems in Russian-Georgian relations (as well as the problems of the Caucasus in general) cannot be solved separately - in a "step-by-step mode." The nature of these problems requires movement not from the particular to the general, but the opposite. In this is the main difficulty of a real settlement of the relations between Russia and Georgia.
