TBILISI (AFP) — Georgia and the United States will on January 4 sign a strategic partnership treaty, the Georgian foreign ministry said on Thursday, in a move that risks again provoking Russian wrath against Tbilisi.
"Georgian Minister of Foreign Affairs Grigol Vashadze and the US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will sign a strategic partnership treaty on January 4 in Washington," foreign ministry spokeswoman Khatuna Iosava told AFP.
The accord, similar to a strategic agreement Washington has recently signed with Ukraine, risks raising tensions with Russia, which earlier this year fought a brief war with Georgia over the breakaway region of South Ossetia.
Post-war tensions between Russia and Georgia are already running high, a fact underlined Wednesday when Russian President Dmitry Medvedev launched an extraordinary personal attack on his Georgian counterpart Mikheil Saakashvili.
"We suspected that our Georgian colleague had problems in his brains but we did not realise that it would be as serious as that," Medvedev said in an end-of-year television interview.
Saakashvili has hailed the US-Georgia treaty as a "historic" move that will allow the two countries' relations to progress towards a new stage.
"The United States has never before said that Georgia is its strategic partner," he said on December 22.
Georgian opposition politicians and analysts agreed that the accord was a positive step but warned not to get carried away by its importance.
"No doubt it is a step forwards in strengthening Georgia's security. But Saakashvili is exaggerating its importance," the leader of the Georgian Republican Party, Levan Berdzenishvili, told AFP.
"This accord is not a substitute for NATO membership, which is the only way to ensure Georgia's security," he added.
An analyst with the Georgian Institute of Public Affairs, Tornike Sharashenidze, said "the accord in question is not about creating military guarantees for Georgia's security. It's mostly of moral force."
The US signed similar strategic partnerships with Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania in 1998, when the three countries were seeking to join NATO in the face of fierce opposition from Moscow.
The US-Baltic Charter was seen as a key tool in moving the countries towards membership in NATO, which they joined in 2004.
The United States and Ukraine on December 19 signed a similar strategic accord that calls for a US diplomatic post in Crimea, a Russian-speaking area where Russia's Black Sea Fleet is based.
NATO ministers agreed at a meeting earlier this month to boost ties with both Georgia and Ukraine, but without granting them the status of official candidates to join the alliance.
Russia sent troops into Georgia, a strong US ally, in early August to repel a Georgian military attempt to retake South Ossetia, which had received extensive backing from Moscow for years.
Russian forces later withdrew to within South Ossetia and another rebel region, Abkhazia, which Moscow simultaneously recognised as independent states.
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