“My goal in life, my political goal, is to unite my people,” the self-styled president, Eduard Kokoity, said in an interview in Tskhinvali.
“We will build our own state, which will be in alliance with Russia, together with Russia, and I am not excluding that one day, we will be part of Russia,” he said. “The people of South Ossetia want to be united with Russia.”
Russia took charge of securing the region’s de facto borders under an April agreement that, Kokoity said, also stipulated there should be 3,700 Russian troops in the region.
“There is not a big enough presence of Russian troops on South Ossetia’s territory,” the 44-year-old ex-wrestler said. “I think on our territory this also includes having more serious weaponry.”
He declined to say how many more troops or what sort of weapons Russia should deploy. Russia also plans to open another military base in the region, he said.
“I don’t want a war and I don’t even want to think about war,” Kokoity said. “My priority is to create stability in the region and not to let another war start.”
South Ossetia and Abkhazia broke away from Georgian rule in wars in the early 1990s. Ethnically distinct from Georgians, South Ossetians speak their own, Farsi-related language and say they have been separated from their fellow people in the neighboring Russian republic of North Ossetia.
Cars arriving in South Ossetia from Russia — the only official way into the pine-covered statelet 100 kilometers north of Tbilisi — are greeted with a billboard saying “Ossetia is indivisible.”
Ninety eight percent of South Ossetia’s population hold Russian passports, Russian is the lingua franca and they use the ruble.
Kokoity said Russia was not yet ready for unification “because this involves a very serious accusation of annexing territory.”
“If Ossetia is united, then I shall leave the political arena for good.”
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