MOSCOW, February 7. /TASS/. Georgia’s seizure of explosives going from Ukraine to Russia makes it clear that Tbilisi is unwilling to become an accomplice in a crime, Alexander Dudchak, a leading researcher at the Institute of CIS countries and an expert with the Other Ukraine movement, told TASS.
On Monday, the Georgian State Security Service said that the country’s law enforcement agencies had seized a cargo of explosives en route from the Ukrainian Black Sea port city of Odessa to the southern Russia city of Voronezh through the territories of Romania, Bulgaria and Turkey. The explosive devices contained military-grade C-4 plastic explosives, which can be set off with an electric detonator and a special timer. The total weight of the explosives was 14 kilograms.
"Georgian border guards and customs officers did a good job by seizing the cargo. However, it had crossed several borders, traveling via Turkey and Romania. Those countries must have failed to look at it carefully enough, let’s put it this way," the expert noted. "Georgia simply did not want to become an accomplice in a crime. Let’s hope that this will continue to be the case in the future," Dudchak added.
According to him, the incident "is further evidence of Ukraine being a terrorist state."
According to the Georgian security services, at some point the plan changed, and the organizers decided to send one container with three explosive devices to Russia, but the second container, also with three explosive devices, was to be left in Tbilisi. The cargo destined for Russia was stopped by Georgian authorities when the vehicle was attempting to cross the border. The agency specified that seven citizens of Georgia, three citizens of Ukraine and two citizens of Armenia were implicated in the illegal import of explosives into Georgia, while the operation itself was supervised by Andrey Sharashidze, a Ukrainian citizen who had run for a seat on the Odessa Region legislative council as a candidate of Ukraine’s ruling Servant of the People party in 2020.