Georgian Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze ruled out restoring diplomatic relations with Russia while Moscow maintains its recognition of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Said plainly, with no diplomatic wrapping.

"As long as the so-called recognition by the Russian Federation is in force, diplomatic relations naturally cannot be restored. Our goal regarding the Russian Federation is a peaceful resolution of the conflict," Kobakhidze said.

He added that peaceful resolution of the conflict is one of the priorities of Georgian foreign policy and expressed hope that it would become possible after political changes. Which political changes, where and when - that he did not specify.

Two territories, eighteen years

Abkhazia and South Ossetia lie within Georgia's internationally recognised borders. Moscow recognised them as independent states in 2008, after the brief August war. Since then Tbilisi has had no diplomatic relations with Russia. That is not a stall of a few months - it is a state of affairs lasting almost two decades and no longer experienced as a crisis, but as a timetable.

And this is exactly the part a Balkan reader recognises. Frozen conflicts do not get resolved, people get used to them. For years there is a line that is not a border but functions as one. There are people living on both sides who have stopped asking what international law says. And there is a government repeating that the solution is peaceful, because any other solution would be expensive, while the peaceful one demands nothing concrete today.

Kobakhidze said the one sentence that costs nothing: no relations while the recognition stands. But the recognition has stood for eighteen years and Moscow has no reason to withdraw it. The question no prime minister answers is what Georgia does if those political changes do not arrive in the next eighteen either.