Last year the candidate, Aslan Bzhania, claimed to have been poisoned by the then-president. Now he has fallen seriously ill again and his campaign says the vote can't go ahead without him.
Moscow, which heavily backs the de facto republic, called the events an “internal affair” of Abkhazia and appealed for talks between the government and opposition.
According to UN statistics, there may be up to 87,000 stateless people in Uzbekistan. Many are ethnic Uzbeks who fled Tajikistan’s civil war in the early 1990s.