Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was a reaction to NATO expansion, Georgian Prime Minister Iraklii Garibashvili said, echoing the Kremlin’s justification for the war, even though his country seeks to become a member of the North Atlantic alliance. His statement is another sign of the split of the Georgian political class towards the West, writes the publication Politico, adopted by News.ro.

Speaking at the GLOBSEC security forum in Bratislava on Tuesday, Irakli Garibashvili said that “one of the main reasons” for the conflict in Ukraine “was the expansion of NATO (…), Ukraine’s desire to become a member of NATO.”

Claims that Western forces were encroaching on Russia’s borders were a key part of Vladimir Putin’s speech before he ordered an all-out assault on Ukraine in February 2022.

Georgia wants to join the military alliance and the EU, but the prime minister’s new statements will not be received well, Politico notes.

At the NATO summit in Bucharest in 2008, Georgia and Ukraine asked to join NATO, but the allies did not find a consensus and were left waiting without a clear horizon for joining. At the beginning of the same year, 77% of Georgian voters supported the country’s accession to NATO in a national referendum. After the vote, the Alliance issued a statement saying the country would eventually become a member, but since then progress on membership has stalled.

A few months after the NATO summit in Bucharest, Russia entered Georgia with troops. Approximately one-fifth of Georgia’s territory is occupied by the Russian armed forces and the separatist regimes supported by it in South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

Later, Tbilisi became one of NATO’s closest partners, the alliance trains the country’s troops.

Despite its stated ambitions to join the EU, Georgia does not fulfill the requirements for the necessary reforms to advance on this path. “We are seeing failures in key areas of the rule of law, governance and human rights,” Brussels said last year.

Earlier this month, Moscow announced that it was lifting a ban on flights between the two countries and lifting the visa requirement for Georgian citizens. Flights resumed, despite the fact that the pro-Western president of Georgia himself said that this move was nothing more than “another Russian provocation.”

According to the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR), oligarch Bidzina Ivanishvili, founder of the ruling Georgian Dream party, “seems to be largely responsible” for Georgia’s pro-Moscow turn. “Thanks to his control over the Georgian Dream party and the government, Ivanishvili could try to bring Georgia into Russia’s sphere of influence,” the Brussels-based analytical center notes.

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