The breakaway republics of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, heavily subsidized by Moscow, will pay a U.S. public relations firm $30,000 per month to improve their image in the West.
Saylor Company, founded by a former Los Angeles Times senior editor, signed one-year contracts with officials in both Georgian breakaway regions in June, Russian media reported Friday.
The agreement with South Ossetia stipulates that Saylor will “remind the world about the Georgian troops’ cruel attack on the civilian population of Tskhinvali in August; inform about how the Russian army saved the civilian population of South Ossetia; and counter the expensive and aggressive information campaign being waged by the Georgian government,” Kommersant reported.
Kristian Bzhania, a spokesman for the Abkhaz president, told Vedomosti that the PR agency would have to reverse the republic’s image of a “Georgian enclave that used its good relations with Russia to make an unexpected decision to break away.”
“Our conflicts with Georgia occurred during the whole period of the U.S.S.R.’s existence, but the West doesn’t know of them yet,” he said.
In December, South Ossetia hired the company’s founder, Mark Saylor, to accompany its human rights activist Lira Tskhovrebova on a trip to the United States aimed at promoting the republic’s view of the August war, Kommersant reported. Saylor organized a news conference for Tskhovrebova, where reporters unexpectedly played audio recordings of Tskhovrebova’s conversation with the South Ossetian KGB, leading to a media scandal.
The Kremlin hired two Western PR firms, New York-based Ketchum and Brussels-based GPlus Europe, to improve Russia’s image in Western countries ahead of a Group of Eight summit in St. Petersburg in 2006.
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