Defence Minister Met with UK Ambassador
Thursday, April 23
Defence Minister of Georgia Mindia Janelidze held a meeting with Ambassador of United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland to Georgia, Alexandra Hall Hall. Deputy Defence Minister Levan Girsiashvili, UK Defence Attache LTC Nick Wilkes, Political Advisor to Ambassador Chris Gaff and UK Special Advisor to Georgian MoD Stephan Glover attended the meeting as well.
The sides discussed current cooperation issues and future prospects in the defence sphere between Georgia and the UK. Georgia’s Euro-Atlantic aspiration, implementation process of NATO-Georgia Substantial Package and UK’s contribution in this process were also discussed.
As Defence Minister outlined, Great Britain is a strategic partner of Georgia and close cooperation with the UK is very essential. “Periodically, we review cooperation process with our partners. Georgia has a very active relationship with the British side. I’d like to emphasize cooperation in military education – we actively cooperate to the direction of joint trainings. We hope the British side will participate in NATO-Georgia joint training scheduled to be held this summer. We also have had a number of exchange meetings. Therefore, similar meetings and discussion of cooperation prospects are necessary to be organized,” stated Minister Mindia Janelidze.
Alexandra Hall Hall focused on the close and fruitful cooperation with the Defence Ministry of Georgia: “We have a very good working relation with the Georgian Ministry of Defence, with the Minister personally and his team. The purpose of my meeting today was to discuss current levels of UK-Georgia cooperation in defence. I was able to confirm that the UK will be contributing to the NATO Core Team to be established in the Georgian Ministry of Defence as part of the NATO package agreed at the Wales Summit. Actually, the UK will be making a very large financial contribution to the Trust Funds which has been set up to fund these defence capacity-building operations. We also talked about the other defence cooperation that is going on between us. We have several Georgian students on British military courses in the UK. We also have number of defence visits. We have a director of international security policy visiting this June.”
