MOSCOW, July 15. /TASS/. Most sober-minded Georgian people come out in favor of mending ties with Russia, as nobody wants a war, the head of the Alliance of Patriots of Georgia opposition party, Georgy Lomiya, said as he met with the head of the Russian Federation Council’s international affairs committee, Konstantin Kosachev, on Monday.
According to him, the developments of the past few weeks have practically destroyed relations that Moscow and Tbilisi have been working on for the past three years. "Unfortunately this has happened [because] destructive political forces in Georgia are engaged in an active fight against those who seek to mend ties with Russia," the parliamentarian said.
The aim of the delegation’s visit to Russia was to help re-establish friendly relations, he said. "Nobody needs war, political sanctions or strife between the countries," he added.
"We are seeking peace and are confident that our visits at the present moment and in the future will help mend relations. I hope that we will not need another three years to once again bring our relations to the point of a visa waiver on your part. This issue had been practically settled, and exactly because of this, Georgia’s destructive political forces staged this upheaval," the opposition parliamentarian added.
Upheaval in Georgia
On June 20, 2019, several thousand protesters amassed near the national parliament in downtown Tbilisi, demanding the resignation of the interior minister and the parliament’s speaker, and tried to storm it. The protests were sparked by an uproar over the Russian delegation’s participation in the 26th session of the Inter-parliamentary Assembly on Orthodoxy (IAO). On June 20, IAO President Sergei Gavrilov opened the session in the Georgian parliament. Opposition lawmakers were outraged by the fact that Gavrilov addressed the event’s participants from the parliament speaker’s seat. In protest, they did not allow the IAO session to continue. Shortly after the turmoil in Tbilisi, Georgian President Salome Zurabishvili branded Russia an enemy and an occupier on her Facebook page, but later on said that nothing threatened Russian tourists in the country. To ensure Russian citizens’ safety, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a decree, which imposed a temporary ban on passenger flights to Georgia from July 8.
In another development, a host at Georgia’s Rustavi-2 TV channel used foul language to scold the Russian leadership for more than a minute. Georgian President Salome Zurabishvili, Prime Minister Mamuka Bakhtadze, Parliament Speaker Archil Talakvadze, former Parliament Speaker Irakli Kobakhidze, Tbilisi Mayor Kakha Kaladze and ex-Foreign Minister Mikheil Janelidze strongly condemned those remarks. In addition, the TV host’s rant received a lot of backlash from a large number of Georgian Facebook users.