PM Kobakhidze says Trump administration echoes positions Georgia has promoted for years

Georgian Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze has said he is pleased that the Trump administration is now repeating, “often word for word”, positions that the Georgian Government has been voicing over the past several years.

Speaking in an interview with the programme Imedis Kvira, Kobakhidze said recent statements by the US administration reflected concerns that Georgia had raised for the past three to four years, particularly regarding challenges facing the European Union.

“In the latest document published by the American administration, statements are repeated almost word for word concerning the problems faced by the European Union. Within the European bureaucracy, discussion of economic problems is practically forbidden, while the EU’s share of the global economy has fallen from 30 per cent in 2008 to 17.5 per cent last year and this negative trend continues,” he said.

Kobakhidze also claimed that such concerns had not been publicly acknowledged by European officials.

“I have not heard anyone else speak about this, neither from within the European bureaucracy nor outside it. I used to make statements on this issue and now we see that an almost identical statement has appeared in an American security document,” Kobakhidze added.