President Dmitry Medvedev urged the government to help the young South Ossetian state become strong and create its own statehood.
He instructed Emergencies Minister Sergei Shoigu to help his colleagues in South Ossetia create an emergencies agency. Medvedev stressed that South Ossetia should be assisted in “fine-tuning state mechanisms” and “provided with the regulations that exist in our country and have proved effective”.
Shoigu said water and power supplies had resumed in full in Tskhinval. Gazprom helped built gas boiler houses in all schools in the republic, which sued to be heated with wood before. “Heating is back in the schools for the first time in 10 years,” the minister said.
He said the construction of a gas pipeline to South Ossetia was underway and expressed hope that the gas pipeline would become operational in the first half of next year.
Shoigu also said that all South Ossetian residents who had lost property or housing had been paid one-time compensation.
Emergencies Ministry specialists have also disarmed about 2,000 artillery shells and aerial bombs in South Ossetia. Two unexploded aerial bombs were discovered in the schoolyard in the village of Dzhava.
