TODAY: US will continue to train Georgian army; EU and Washington comment on Putin’s Abkhazia trip; Merkel expected to address human rights at meeting about Opel; Kadyrov to sue Memorial chief.  Yushchenko ‘disappointed’ with Medvedev’s stance; new novel about crime and corruption by the master plotter Vladislav Surkov?

The EU has criticized Prime Minister Putin’s trip to Abkhazia as being incompatible with the ‘principle of territorial integrity’.  The trip prompted a US State Department spokesman to comment that Russia should respect the ‘sovereignty and territorial integrity of Georgia’.  The US will resume the training of Georgian soldiers to prepare troops for deployment to Afghanistan.  Despite Washington’s assertion that the exercises have nothing to do with ‘internal defenses’, it is expected that the move may rile the Kremlin.  A ‘security vacuum’ has been left by war in the Caucasus, says an article in the New York Times, which offers a bleak prognosis of the future for the troubled zone.   ‘Russia’s “victory” in the Chechen wars is deceptive. The entire north Caucasus remains a battleground, where people die daily’, says the Economist.