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Russia ready to move stage-by-stage towards lifting restrictions in ties with Georgia

At a meeting with Georgian legislators, Russian MP Leonid Kalashnikov pledged that the Russian parliamentarians were ready to discuss the whole range of issues regarding bilateral relations

MOSCOW, July 15./TASS/. Russia is ready to work stage-by-stage on lifting restrictions towards Georgia, but under the understanding that the Georgian authorities themselves are ready for this, the chairman of the State Duma lower house’s Committee on Commonwealth of Independent States Affairs, Eurasian Integration and Relations with Compatriots, Leonid Kalashnikov, said on Monday.

"Russia is ready to move in every possible way towards a stage-by-stage lifting of restrictions, and I know this, without ruling out in the future the measures (towards rapprochement - TASS) that we had being discussing with our colleagues from the Alliance of Patriots until quite recently," Kalashnikov said after meeting with deputies from Georgia’s opposition party.

"But of course, Russia will be doing this under full understanding and confidence that the Georgian authorities are ready for this as well," the parliamentarian added.

At a meeting with Georgian legislators, Kalashnikov pledged that the Russian parliamentarians were ready to discuss the whole range of issues regarding relations between the countries.

Anti-Russian provocations

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.