The president of the Georgian parliament is visiting Bucharest / Shalva Papuashvili, a critic of Ukraine. Why Tbilisi accuses Kiev of conspiracy

The 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 have recently accused officials in Kiev of trying to topple the government in Tbilisi.

According to a press release published by Agerpres, the president of the Georgian legislature Shalva Papuashvili, during his visit on Monday, will have one-on-one talks with the president of the Romanian Senate, Nicolae Ciucă, followed by a meeting of the two parliamentary delegations. In the afternoon, Papuashvili will participate in the proceedings of the Senate plenary session.

The President of the Parliament of Georgia has scheduled meetings with the interim President of the Chamber of Deputies, Alfred Simonis, and with the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Luminiţa Odobescu.

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

Earlier this week, Georgia accused a senior Ukrainian official of preparing a coup to overthrow the government of this country in the Caucasus, at a time when relations between Tbilisi and Kiev are strained, AFP notes.

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

On Monday, Georgia’s National Security Service charged Georgi Lortkipanidze, the deputy head of Ukraine’s military counterintelligence service, with plotting to “violently overthrow the government” with the complicity of a foreign state.

Lortkipanidze is a former deputy interior minister of Georgia.

The Georgian National Security Service also named, among the accomplices of the Georgians fighting with the Russian troops in Ukraine, a former bodyguard of the former president in prison, Mikheil Saakashvili, who in the past held official positions in Ukraine. Some of them “are trained near the border between Ukraine and Poland”, according to the quoted source.

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

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

“Ukraine has not intervened and does not intend to intervene in Georgia’s internal affairs”

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

“Georgian authorities are again trying to demonize Ukraine in order to solve their internal political problems,” he argued, adding: “The Ukrainian state does not intervene, has not intervened and does not intend to intervene in Georgia’s internal affairs.”

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

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

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

Papuashvili: “Misunderstandings in Georgian-Ukrainian relations, more than a decade old”

“Ukrainians are the closest people to Georgians. Despite our severe security situation caused by continued Russian occupation, as well as the absence of a credible 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 sisters and brothers. And yet, some of the actions of the Ukrainian government defied both logic and our shared history of fraternal relations,” Shalva Papuashvili denounced the other day in a post on X (Twitter).

“The misunderstandings in Georgian-Ukrainian relations do not originate in the last two years. For some time, perhaps more than a decade, successive governments in Kiev have intermittently harbored fugitive Georgian politicians who were wanted for serious crimes in Georgia. The most important of these is Saakashvili, who abandoned his Georgian passport for Ukrainian citizenship and the lucrative post of governor in Odesa, which has continuously caused political problems in Georgia. Also, no matter how little they are known, the Ukrainian government also harbors the former Prosecutor General of the Saakashvili regime, Zurab Adeishvili, and the former Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs Giorgi Lortkipanidze, who are now at the center of the new political scandal,” he added this.