Russian PM: Georgia joining NATO will be a catastrophe

“Georgia’s integration into NATO will have catastrophic consequences,” Russia’s prime minister Dmitry Medvedev said in an interview to Kommersant FM, a Russian radio station.

“Georgia becoming part of the North-Atlantic Alliance might trigger a terrible conflict. It’s incomprehensible why it needs to do it.”

He also said that the 2008 August war ‘could have been avoided’. Only excerpts of the interview have been aired so far. Kommersant FM says it will publish the whole interview later.

• At a summit in Bucharest ten years ago, NATO member states released a joint statement saying Georgia and Ukraine would become a part of the Alliance in the future.
• On 12 July NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg reaffirmed the Allied leaders’ support for Georgia’s aspiration to join the Alliance. He did not specify when this would happen though.
• Russian president Vladimir Putin has said on many occasions that Russia regards NATO’s expansion into Georgia and Ukraine with ‘the utmost disapproval’.