Please help improve it estonia georgia relations discuss these issues on the talk page. This article’s lead section may be too long for the length of the article.
Please help by moving some material from it into the body of the article. Russia relations after the Russo-Georgian War. Please expand the article to include this information. Further details may exist on the talk page. The relations between Georgia and Russia date back hundreds of years and remain complicated despite certain religious and historical ties that exist between the two countries and their people.
Despite Russia’s vowing to defend Eastern Georgia, it rendered no assistance when the Persians invaded in 1795, as they sought to reestablish their traditional suzerainty over the region. The Georgian nobility did not accept the decree until April 1802 when General Knorring surrounded the nobility in Tbilisi’s Sioni Cathedral and forced them to take an oath on the Imperial Crown of Russia. Those who disagreed were temporarily arrested. Having spent more than a century as part of the Russian Empire, in 1918 Georgia regained independence and established the First Republic. In 1921 Georgia was invaded and occupied by Bolshevik Russia to form the Soviet Union in 1922. On August 29, 2008, in the aftermath of the Russo-Georgian War, Deputy Foreign Minister Grigol Vashadze announced that Georgia had broken diplomatic relations with Russia. He also said that Russian diplomats must leave Georgia, and that no Georgian diplomat would remain in Russia, while only consular relations would be maintained.
Russia has supported separatist movements in Abkhazia and South Ossetia since the early 1990s. In the aftermath of the military setback in Abkhazia in 1993, the Georgian leader Eduard Shevardnadze had to accede to the Kremlin’s pressure. At the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe Istanbul Summit of November 1999, agreement was reached that the bases would all be evacuated by Russia before July 1, 2001. Vaziani was handed over on June 29, 2001. Akhalkalaki was not handed over until June 27, 2007, and Batumi on November 13, 2007.
