Russia's Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has described as deliberate provocation Sunday's incident, in which the motorcade with the Georgian Mikhail Saakashvili and his Polish counterpart Lech Kaczynski was fired at near South Ossetia.

In Lavrov's words, the incident had been staged by the Georgian side, which then went on to accuse Russia or the Ossetians of organizing it.

Before Russian journalists in Peru's capital Lima, where Lavrov was for an Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum, Russia's Foreign Minister formally denied that there had been any shooting at the motorcade of the two Presidents.

Lavrov said the whole situation in which the Georgian President invited his Polish counterpart to Tbilisi, and then set off with him for another country was clearly a provocation.

Representatives of Russia's Foreign and Defense Ministries in Moscow also declared Russian troops had not fired at the Presidents of Georgia and Poland.

After his return to Warsaw, the Polish President Lech Kaczynski said no one had to be blamed for the incident because he himself had requested the change in the route of the motorcade.

Kaczynski declined to comment on the Polish-Russian relations in light of the incident. He was in Georgia for the celebrations of the fifth anniversary since the so called Rose Revolution, which brought down the former Georgian President Eduard Shevardnadze in 2003.

The visit to the border region close to South Ossetia, where Sunday's shooting is reported to have occurred, had not originally been part of Kaczynski's official program in Georgia.

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