Estonian President Visits Georgia

Estonian President Toomas Hendrik Ilves, who is visiting Tbilisi, reiterated his country’s “strong and continued support” for Georgia’s Euro-Atlantic aspirations and said that “positive decision” on EU visa waiver is possible before the end of this year if Georgia tackles remaining “technical issues.”

President Ilves started two-day official visit to Tbilisi with a meeting with his Georgian counterpart Giorgi Margvelashvili on Tuesday. He will hold talks with PM Irakli Garibashvili and parliament speaker Davit Usupashvili on June 3.

Speaking at a joint news conference with his Georgian counterpart, President Ilves stressed that the EU Eastern Partnership Summit in Riga last month was a success and that only “technical issues” need to be resolved and the EU visa waiver “will happen.”

“Some people I’ve read here don’t think it was successful, but the point is that simply for technical grounds… the visa liberalization – this takes a little longer, there was not enough time to get there,” the Estonian president said.

He said that “as long as Georgia works on the technical side, it will happen this year, before the end of 2015 – there will be a positive decision.”

“You need to focus on technical issues, really. By the end of the year, the decision will be made to liberalize visa regime between Georgia and EU. It will also take another 4-5 months before that is implemented… It will happen,” President Ilves said.

Georgian President Margvelashvili, who thanked Estonia for its support, said that Georgia currently has all the “instruments” and “resources” from the EU to successfully meet reform targets required for EU visa waiver and for further European integration.

He stressed that deliberate attempts to “diminish these resources” is part of “propaganda”, which aims at portraying “our perspectives as being doomed to a failure.”

On Georgia’s European perspective, the Estonian President said that “the perspective is there, the only question is when it will happen; again, focus on the technical issues as much as you can.”

To ease the process of the EU integration, Ilves stressed that Georgia needs “to show that you are as good as others”, which, he said, was what Estonia did before joining the EU.

He said that when Estonia signed the Association Agreement with the EU in 1995, nothing was mentioned about the EU accession.

“Think of EU integration as a process of state building,” Ilves said.

Asked about Russia’s reaction to the Riga Eastern Partnership summit, which said its decisions were “same old tunes”, Ilves responded: “Do you take seriously anything coming from that country?.. I can’t comment on their statements.”

On NATO, Ilves said that “Estonia is one of the strongest supporters of Georgian membership” in the Alliance.