On August 14 2008, Bulgarian Deputy Foreign Minister Milen Keremedchiev was scheduled to leave for Georgia as a special envoy on behalf of Bulgaria, with a mission to get to know the situation in the conflict area on the ground and assess the opportunities to provide humanitarian aid to the ones who suffered from the hostilities, the press service of the Foreign Ministry said in a statement.
Keremedchiev's mission was ordered by Bulgarian Prime Minister Sergei Stanishev in response to the request made by Tbilisi for a Bulgarian representative be sent to Georgia.
Several days earlier, on August 10, Keremedchiev met Georgian ambassador to Bulgaria Mikheil Ukleba, who officially invited Bulgaria, as a member of the EU, to send its representative to examine the situation on the spot.
Meanwhile, the representations of Russia and Georgia to Bulgaria spent the past week pointing fingers at each other. At a news conference in Sofia on August 13, Ivan Hotulev, minister-plenipotentiary at Russias embassy to Bulgaria qualified Georgias actions as a "thoroughly planned military campaign" against the South Ossetians and said that Russia only intervened to restore peace.
A day earlier, Ukleba told journalists that Russias goal in the conflict was to topple Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili and stop Georgias drive towards Nato and EU membership.
