“Whether our sovereignty is abolished with bayonets or with words makes no essential difference to statehood. What the Red Army did with bayonets, Kaja Kallas is now trying to do with words and abolish our sovereignty,” said the Speaker of Parliament, Shalva Papuashvili, responding to a statement by the EU’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, Kaja Kallas, in which she said that she supports not the Georgian government but the Georgian people.

According to Papuashvili, “this is Brussels abolishing Georgia’s independence by depriving the Georgian people of the right to choose their own government.”

“When the Red Army entered Georgia in 1921, they also claimed to be coming to help the Georgian people, entering in the name of the Georgian people, saying that the then government of independent Georgia did not serve the people and that the Georgian people needed help. That is how the Red Army entered Georgia with bayonets and abolished our sovereignty - by saying that it was not the will of the people that mattered, but that they would define who the ‘people’ were, use that as a pretext, enter, and abolish sovereignty with bayonets. Whether our sovereignty is abolished with bayonets or with words makes no essential difference to statehood. What the EU’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs said yesterday is the verbal abolition of our sovereignty. What the Red Army did with bayonets, Kaja Kallas is now trying to do with words and abolish our sovereignty. She chooses for herself who the Georgian people are, and for her, the Georgian people are the agents funded by her, and in the name of this imaginary Georgian people she seeks to abolish our statehood.

This is a direct abolition of Georgia’s independence by Brussels, when the Georgian people are stripped of the right to choose their own government. What does it mean to say, ‘we support the people but not the government’? Whose government is this? It is the government elected by the Georgian people. That is democracy. The person who says this either does not understand what democracy is, or pursues a policy of abolishing the sovereignty of other countries. In Kaja Kallas’s case, I think it is more the former. This is not the first time we have heard from her views completely detached from reality, and once again it shows, unfortunately, the immaturity of the EU’s foreign policy in the face of the challenges Europe is facing. This is exactly what the White House calls the ‘Estonization’ of the EU’s foreign policy - where European diplomacy has been replaced by reckless activism, which has led the entire continent to catastrophe. The war in Ukraine would not have happened if Europe had demonstrated adequate political maturity,” Papuashvili said.

For reference, Kaja Kallas has stated that the Georgian government is leading the country in the wrong direction and that this path does not lead toward the European Union. She also said that “they support the Georgian people, but not the Georgian government.”