Speaker of the Parliament of Georgia, Shalva Papuashvili, will pay an official visit to Bucharest on Monday. The Georgian politician, who is part of the ruling Georgian Dream party, is among those who recently accused officials in Kyiv of trying to topple the government in Tbilisi.

According to a press release published by Agerpres, during his visit on Monday, the president of the legislature of Georgia, Shalva Papuashvili, will have personal talks with the president of the Senate of Romania, Nicolae Chuke, after which the two parliamentary delegations will meet. In the afternoon, Papuashvili will take part in the plenary session of the Senate.

The speaker of the Parliament of Georgia also has scheduled meetings with the interim president of the Chamber of Deputies, Alfred-Robert Simonis, and the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Luminice Odobescu.

Tbilisi accuses a Ukrainian official of trying to overthrow the Georgian government

Earlier this week, Georgia accused a senior Ukrainian official of plotting a coup d’état to topple the country’s government in the Caucasus, at a time when relations between Tbilisi and Kyiv are strained, AFP noted.

It should be remembered that Georgia is accused of collaborating with the Kremlin, even though Russian troops have been stationed in the separatist regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia since 2008, the year of the Russian invasion.

On Monday, the National Security Service of Georgia charged the deputy head of the Military Counterintelligence Service of Ukraine, Heorhiy Lortkipanidze, with conspiracy to “forcibly overthrow the government” with the assistance of a foreign state.

Lortkipanidze is a former Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs of Georgia.

The National Security Service of Georgia also named among the accomplices of Georgians fighting with Russian forces in Ukraine, the former bodyguard of the former president in prison, Mikheil Saakashvili, who in the past held official positions in Ukraine. Some of them “are undergoing training near the border between Ukraine and Poland,” the quoted source said.

In July, the authorities in Kyiv summoned the Georgian ambassador, accusing Tbilisi of “torturing” Mikheil Saakashvili, also a citizen of Ukraine and adviser to President Volodymyr Zelenskyi, in prison.

According to a Georgian press release on Monday, as part of this plot, anti-government demonstrations are planned in Tbilisi “in October and December”, months during which the next assessments of Georgia’s progress towards joining the European Union will be made public.

“Ukraine has not interfered and does not intend to interfere in the internal affairs of Georgia”

Ukraine rejected these accusations. “This information is false,” Oleg Nikolenko, spokesman for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine, said on Facebook.

“The Georgian authorities are again trying to demonize Ukraine in order to solve their domestic political problems,” he claimed, adding: “The Ukrainian state does not interfere, has not interfered, and does not intend to interfere in the internal affairs of Georgia.”

In June 2022, the EU denied Georgia the status of candidate for integration, instead granting it to Ukraine and the Republic of Moldova.

The European Union expects from Tbilisi especially reforms in matters of justice, the electoral system, freedom of the press and the fight against oligarchs.

In early March, tens of thousands of people demonstrated in the Georgian capital, accusing the government of backing away from pro-Western aspirations.

Papuashvili: “Misunderstanding in Georgian-Ukrainian relations for more than ten years”

“Ukrainians are the closest people to Georgians. Despite our difficult security situation caused by the ongoing Russian occupation, as well as the absence of a reliable security umbrella such as NATO membership, the Georgian government and people have provided strong political support, generous material aid and humanitarian shelter to our Ukrainian brothers and sisters. And yet some actions of the Ukrainian government contradicted both logic and our shared history of fraternal relations,” condemned Shalva Papuashvili the other day in a post on X (Twitter).

“Disagreements in Georgian-Ukrainian relations did not arise in the last two years. For some time, perhaps more than a decade, successive governments in Kyiv have periodically harbored fugitive Georgian politicians wanted for serious crimes in Georgia. The most important of them is Saakashvili, who renounced his Georgian passport in favor of Ukrainian citizenship and the lucrative position of governor of Odesa, which constantly caused political problems in Georgia. Also, no matter how little they are known, the Ukrainian authorities are also hiding the former Prosecutor General of Saakashvili’s time, Zurab Adeishvili, and the former Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs, Heorhiy Lortkipanidze, who are now at the center of a new political scandal.” , he also claimed that.