Saakashvili: Always Ready for Talks with Putin
President Saakashvili said he’s “always ready for dialogue” with Vladimir Putin, Russia’s PM who will swap jobs with President Medvedev next year.
“Putin has never been gone anywhere,” Saakashvili said, suggesting that Putin has always been in full charge of Russia. “But as now he is formally back again, I am always ready for dialogue with him. But the dialogue is based on [the principle] that two equal nations are speaking with each other and not what he thinks that he can nail us in the corner, run over us, bribe us, undermine us from within; he won’t be able to undermine us; we have already passed through that and managed to cope with them,” Saakashvili said in an interview with the Rustavi 2 TV late on Friday night.
Saakashvili said that he told his French counterpart, Nicolas Sarkozy, during a bilateral meeting in Tbilisi on October 7 that he was ready for dialogue with Putin. Earlier on the same day the French President called on Russia and Georgia in his outdoor speech in Tbilisi for replacing rhetoric of confrontation with a dialogue.
Saakashvili also said that Putin’s recent call for Eurasian Union was in fact call for restoring the Soviet Union.
“Sarkozy said today [in his outdoor speech in Tbilisi], that the Soviet Union can not be restored anymore and the sooner they [Russia’s leaders] realize it the better,” Saakashvili said.
“We have no illusion that current Russia will tolerate our development, but I also have no illusion that they will succeed,” he said.
He also said that those times when small countries were “sold out” or “abandoned”, like it happened to Georgia in 1921 when the Bolshevik Red Army invaded the country, were gone and the visit of the French President to Georgia was a confirmation of that.
