Speaking during a meeting with EU foreign policy chief, Javier Solana, in the Abkhazia capital of Sukhumi on Friday, the breakaway republic's leader Sergei Bagapsh said there would be no peace talks with Tbilisi until all Georgian troops were withdrawn from the upper part of Abkhazia's Kodori Gorge and Georgia formally pledged not to resume hostilities.
"We will not accept ultimatums from separatists," Georgia's State Minister for Euro-Atlantic Integration Giorgi Baramidze said. "Georgian troops will stay where they are supposed to stay - in Georgian territory."
Abkhazia broke away from Georgia in the early 1990s following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Between 10,000 and 30,000 people were killed in the subsequent hostilities. The two sides signed a ceasefire in 1994.
Peace talks between Abkhazia and Georgia broke off in July 2006 when Tbilisi sent troops into Abkhazia's Kodori Gorge and established an alternative Abkhaz administration there.
Speaking about the second part of the Abkhazian ultimatum, Baramidze said Georgia would sign an agreement with Abkhazia not to resume hostilities only if the EU rather than Russia acted as the guarantor of such an agreement.
A collective CIS peacekeeping force, staffed mainly with Russian military personnel, has been deployed in the Georgian-Abkhaz conflict zone since the end of Georgian-Abkhazian hostilities.
Georgia recently said Russia's current peacekeeping mission in the Georgian-Abkhazian conflict zone was no longer neutral and it should be replaced by a EU peacekeeping contingent.
