“Yesterday in Yerevan, a Charter of Strategic Cooperation was signed between the United States and Armenia. Not long ago, we were the first and only state in the region to hold a strategic partnership with the United States. Today, we are the only state in the region that does not hold a strategic partnership with the United States, because Georgia has forfeited this most vital of levers, as a result of Georgian Dream’s anti-Georgian policy,” declared Grigol Gegelia, a member of Strong Georgia – Lelo.

Gegelia noted that the U.S. Vice President had recently visited both Yerevan and Baku, and the Secretary of State has now visited Yerevan, whilst Georgia finds itself in a state of complete international isolation.

“At a time when Armenia has secured a nine-billion-dollar defence capability package and is creating tens of thousands of new jobs thanks to major new investors, the pro-Russian regime is dismantling our country’s economic prospects and driving an already impoverished nation deeper into poverty. At a time when Armenia and Azerbaijan have achieved a historic peace and laid the foundations of the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity (TRIPP), Georgia stands at risk of losing its historic role entirely, with the region’s new principal transit corridor bypassing it completely, because the Georgian Dream regime deliberately torpedoed the Anaklia Deep Sea Port project years ago, thereby undermining the prospects of the Middle Corridor and our country’s geopolitical and economic chances.

Even now, the Georgian Dream regime is deceiving Georgian society and our partners when it claims that building Anaklia is its goal. Nothing is happening at a port into which the first vessels should have sailed six years ago, because Ivanishvili, cowed by Putin, is determined that nothing great, significant, patriotic, or genuinely Georgian should come to pass in Georgia. The wish of the United States State Department is entirely plain and unambiguous: America wants not two but all three states of the region to participate in the Trump Route. This is precisely what Lelo has been saying all along: firstly, Anaklia must be declared a strategic facility of national importance; secondly, Anaklia must become part of the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity (TRIPP); and thirdly, it must be built based on a transparent contract, with the critical involvement of American and European capital,” Grigol Gegelia noted.