TBILISI, May 2. /TASS/: Georgian President Salome Zourabichvili’s official visit to the United States has not been canceled and efforts are underway for holding it, the Foreign Ministry told TASS on Thursday.
"The report that allegedly the Georgian side’s request on the Georgian president’s visit to the US has been rejected, does not correspond to reality. The work on the president’s visit via diplomatic channels is underway. It’s early to say about the date of the visit," the ministry said.
Acting US Ambassador to Georgia Ross Wilson has also confirmed that the effort on organizing the president’s visit to the US was ongoing.
Earlier in the day, the Rustavi 2 broadcaster reported citing its sources that Zourabichvili’s visit to the US scheduled for this autumn had been canceled.
Earlier, Zourabichvili told VOA's Georgian Service in an interview in Tbilisi published on Wednesday that the construction of US military base in Georgia is inadvisable and may be viewed as a provocation. According to Zourabichvili, a former French diplomat who became Georgia’s first woman president in December 2018, Georgia needs to deepen ties with Washington, but should not take any steps, which would provoke other countries. This Zourabichvili’s statement has been condemned by the Georgian opposition, which threatened to impeach the president.
Georgia and the United States signed the Charter on Strategic Partnership in 2009. Since 1994, Tbilisi has been boosting its cooperation with NATO and has stated many times about its desire to join the alliance. In August 2015, the Georgia-NATO Joint Training and Evaluation Center (JTEC) was opened at a military base in Krtsanisi near Tbilisi.
In 2016, the Defense Institution Building School was inaugurated in Tbilisi, and in May 2018 a combat training center was opened in Vaziani, near the Georgian capital, with the US assistance. This center, similar to the German base Hohenfels, is designed to train Georgian military. This April, Georgian Defense Minister Levan Izoria put forward a proposal to provide the US and NATO countries with Georgia’s military infrastructure for holding drills.
