Kokoyty's victory was unexpected and owed much to the support of the Tedeyev clan, one of South Ossetia's most powerful families.

He had gained key support from Albert "Dik" Tedeyev and his brother Dzhambolat, also a champion wrestler, who organized and financed Kokoyty's election campaign.

[citation needed] After Kokoyty was elected president, members of the Tedeyev clan took over responsibility for the republic's customs service and for freight traffic along the Transcaucasian highway.

[citation needed] Kokoyty has taken a strong position against reunification with Georgia, although he has expressed a willingness to negotiate a peace settlement on the basis of South Ossetia being treated as an independent state (a precondition rejected by the Tbilisi government).

Prior to the 2006 presidential elections, he stated that the Georgian-Ossetian conflict was not an inter-ethnic, but clearly a political one caused by Georgia's desire to impose on Ossetians the norms of Western democracy which could not be superior to the Caucasian traditional laws.

Barankevich further claimed that Kokoyty had fled Tskhinvali during the Russo-Georgian War and accused him of personally torturing a captured Georgian soldier.

South Ossetia's former interior minister and chair of the supreme court, Alan Parastayev, told the Georgian Imedi TV that Kokoyty had organized a series of terrorist attacks and ordered murders for which he blamed Georgia.

[12][13] On 3 March 2009, the Russian newspaper Kommersant reported that Kokoyty's administration and the Kremlin were at odds over the control of aid funds allocated from Russia's federal budget to South Ossetia and Tskhinvali was at the verge of "social explosion".

[14][15] In May 2009, Albert Dzhussoyev and Dzhabulat Tadeyev announced they would seek to organize early presidential elections in order to remove Kokoyty whom they accused of authoritarianism, corruption and being "unreliable" for Russia.

[19] Kosta Dzugaev, an advisor to Kokoyty, immediately blasted the poll as "lies", claiming the MTsPA had never actually done any research in South Ossetia.