Opposition summons Envoy to Russia

The United National Movement (UNM) opposition party is summoning Zurab Abashidze, the Prime Minister's special representative for relations with Russia, to Parliament after his planned meeting with Deputy Russian Foreign Minister Grigory Karasin.

UNM member Salome Samadashvili appealed to Parliament’s Foreign Relations Committee to summon Abashidze to the session.

"We need to respond to the statement that was made a few days ago by Zurab Abashidze, who said that the visa-free regime with Europe was achieved due to our limited dialogue with Russia.

This is a direct attempt to mislead our society, as if we must first develop our relationship with Russia in order to have success in terms of our Euro-Atlantic integration,” Samadashvili stated.

She said that in fact the opposite is true, and the irreversible European path of Georgia would help the country regulate relations with Russia.

“One of the factors of the success of our European project was our dialogue with Russia,” Abashidze said several days ago. He called the European Parliament's decision “historic” and added that "this is clear evidence that the country has a reasonable foreign policy”.

Abashidze is very likely to make an additional explanation over his statements.

He is very likely to say that he meant the peace ensured by the current Georgian government, i.e. the Government’s current relations with Russia, helped the country to carry out the reforms that were essential for Georgia to be granted visa liberalisation with the EU.

From this point of view, if he really means this, Abashidze is right, because if Georgia was at war with Russia neither visa liberalisation nor any other success would be possible for Georgia.