Georgian Parliament Speaker Shalva Papuashvili on Monday said the country’s accession to NATO was a “political objective” that was “bringing Georgians together”, Ednews reports citing agenda.ge.
In his open letter ahead of the NATO Summit that will kick off on Tuesday in Lithuania’s capital city of Vilnius, Papuashvili noted “Georgia seems to be hitting a glass door since there is nothing left of the arguments against Georgia's membership in NATO”.
"If Georgians are united by any political goal, it is primarily Georgia's accession to NATO, which, unfortunately, does not depend only on us. [...] It is true that the alliance announced at the 2008 Bucharest summit that Georgia would become a member of NATO, but since then, little had changed qualitatively in NATO's approach to Georgia's membership”, Papuashvili said.
The country’s chief legislator stressed the country had “fundamentally” changed its democratic institutions, left behind an “authoritarian” system of governance, and approximated its defence capabilities to NATO standards over the last decade, and pointed out that “NATO only repeats the promise of membership from summit to summit”.
“It is true that Georgia-NATO political and military cooperation has increased significantly and Georgia has received substantial assistance from the alliance, but, qualitatively, little has changed in NATO's inert approach to the critically important issue of Georgia's accession”, Papuashvili continued.
