Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Vladimir Putin, President of Russia
I personally have changed my attitude to the current Georgian leadership, not to the Georgian people - it is still the most kind and benevolent.
Even at the most difficult time, when in the Caucasus people were fighting in connection with certain events, I will not speak about such things in vain, but then the attitudes towards the Georgian people were most kind.
I must say that, you know, it was confirmed even in the difficult days and hours by the attitude of Georgians to Russia.
I do not remember if I once spoke publicly about it or not: in one of the cities an old man came up to our military and said:
"What are you looking for here? Go over there, go to Tbilisi, take Mishka away. Why are you looking at me here?"
We had, as you know, many casualties among our military personnel.
A plane of ours was shot down once and the pilot landed somewhere in the territory. An old Georgian woman came and said: "Come here, son".
She took him with her and fed him. Then he went down to the Russian military.
When I say that I have the most positive attitude towards the Georgian people, I'm not kidding. We have the deepest relationship, both cultural and spiritual, I mean our religious affinity.
There are problems which have arisen not through our fault, we did not start this fighting. And now it's quite obvious, it was recognized long ago.
Something has happened. We said a thousand times: in any case, do not do this, do not allow bloodshed.
They did not listen to us. Now there is a certain reality. We cannot ignore this.
But nevertheless we see signals delivered by the new Georgian leadership.
I do not know what our Minister of Foreign Affairs meant; there may be some formal things related to the work of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
But, realizing the situation as we see it, as for the situation in Georgia, I think we could reach a return to a visa-free regime.
It is necessary to consider that at an expert level.
I think it would be a very good step in the normalization of relations between the two countries, bearing in mind that it would help people communicate with each other, would help Georgian companies operate on the Russian market and could generally create the conditions for a fundamental final normalization of our relations.