Reuters
ST PETERSBURG, Russia (Reuters) – Russia has evidence that citizens from NATO member states including the United States and Turkey fought for Georgia in the five-day August war, Russia's top investigator said on Monday.
A senior security official in Tbilisi dismissed the statement and said by law only Georgian nationals could serve in the country's armed forces.
Asked to list the nationalities of the foreign fighters it believes were involved, Alexander Bastrykin, head of the Prosecutor-General's investigative committee said: "America, the Czech Republic, Chechnya, the Baltic States, Ukraine and Turkey."
"It was a fairly small number of people. They mainly fulfilled support roles," Bastrykin told reporters in Russia's second city of St Petersburg.
He said some had conducted training for the Georgian armed forces. "There were also two snipers ... one from Ukraine and I believe a Latvian woman," he said.
He said he considered the presence of foreign fighters a criminal offence and said he would bring it up at a meeting with representatives of Interpol.
Russia launched a massive counter-offensive on land and sea in August after Georgian forces tried to retake South Ossetia, a Moscow-backed separatist region that rejects Tbilisi's rule.
(Reporting by Denis Dyomkin in St Petersburg, Russia and Margarita Antidze in Tbilisi; writing by Simon Shuster; editing by Matthew Jones)
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