You don't get used to what you've seen right away. Sad ruins of conflagrations, walls chipped by bullets and shell fragments, bridges blown up. Abkhazia, Sukhumi, the sixth year after the war.

The brutal, senseless civil war of 1992-1993, which cost a lot of human lives, turned this most fertile resort region into an island on land - squeezed between mountains and the sea, closed by military patrols on the Psou and Inguri rivers, with camp sites and sanatoriums in which there are almost no vacationers, with deserted beaches in the middle of the Black Sea season of fun resort madness.

Today it is already difficult to understand and understand who is right and who is wrong. One thing is clear - there was a disaster. And one of the forces responsible for maintaining peace is the Russian peacekeepers. People with blue stripes on their helmets came here in June 1994. Since then, the Georgian-Abkhazian conflict has moved from an armed to a political stage. Fires and looting stopped, beautiful beaches and sanatoriums ceased to be battlefields. But the tension remained. Mutual accusations of provocations and non-fulfillment of agreements, incessant mine warfare and analysis of local conflicts - today it is the everyday life of peacekeepers, more than six dozen dead and hundreds of wounded soldiers of the Collective Peacekeeping Forces in the conflict zone-this is the price of the shaky peace established in the region today.

The commander of the KSPM, Major General Sergey Korobko, proudly tells about his subordinates Colonels Vladimir Kutepov, Vladimir Gurov, Vladimir Dorofeev, Lieutenant Colonel Igor Kormilin, Gennady Zhigulsky, Oleg Abramov, Majors Fyodor Lishafayev, Leonid Volkotruba, Valery Bychkov and many,many other officers and soldiers who honorably perform their difficult soldier's duty in the Soviet Union. conflict zone. And it's not just that in remote, hard - to-reach areas of mountainous terrain, in the conditions of a real sabotage and terrorist war, peacekeeping garrisons and posts not only perform their assigned functions, but also live a full-fledged military life, manage to fully fulfill the plans of combat training.

To reduce possible losses, officers show truly wonderful resourcefulness and ingenuity, oppose the blunt force of terror with professional knowledge and experience. Self-made and very effective sound traps were installed at checkpoints to help observers, additional shelters were installed on APCs carrying personnel to protect them from shrapnel and stray bullets, and additions were made to the traditional rules for using artillery to reduce the dead zone when shooting in the mountains. Soldiers of the rear units also pass a good school of combat skills here. It is not an easy task to provide adequate food, logistics, water and heat supply to units performing combat missions.

And one last thing. Inflation and economic turmoil in Russia today have hit its soldiers serving in hot spots the hardest. The lack of timely indexation and amendments to the monetary support of military personnel of peacekeeping contingents leads to the fact that during their stay in the combat zone, the money earned with sweat and blood becomes purely conditional, Gentlemen legislators and law enforcement officers need to think about this. And if there are any doubts or questions, then you can go somewhere in Gali or Zemo Bargebi along slightly mined roads, under the bullets of free horsemen, and find out whether this is so or not.

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