Saakashvili: No MAP at Bucharest would be ‘great Russian victory’

As NATO members ready for tomorrow’s summit in Bucharest, President Mikheil Saakashvili warned that giving Georgia anything less than a roadmap to alliance membership would amount to a “great Russian victory.”

Georgia, along with Ukraine, is hoping to receive a Membership Action Plan (MAP) at the April 2–4 summit. But a number of member states remain publicly opposed to the move, which requires a consensus, and NATO officials have suggested Georgia could be offered a new plan as political consolation, somewhere between a MAP and the aspirant state’s current level of partnership.

But in a Financial Times interview published on March 30, Saakashvili said that anything short of a MAP would “immediately lead, next morning to Moscow crying victory.”

The president, reiterating earlier comments from his administration, also said it would be tantamount to “basically giving [Russia] direct veto rights, because that’s how they will perceive it.”

As Tbilisi has vigorously made its case for a MAP in the past few weeks, Moscow’s opposition to Georgia and Ukraine’s membership bids has become more vocal.

"We are not happy about the situation around Georgia and Ukraine,” said Dmitry Medvedev, Russia’s president-elect, in a Financial Times interview published March 25. “We consider that it is extremely troublesome for the existing structure of European security… No state can be pleased about having representatives of a military bloc to which it does not belong coming close to its borders."

Saakashvili said the alliance should not refuse Georgia and Ukraine MAPs simply to prevent a “big argument” between NATO members and appear united in front of Russia.

“I think this is a very, very wrong argument. NATO united around what? Around appeasement? We’ve seen Europe united once like this in the last century and we saw where it led,” he said.

On March 27 Foreign Minister Davit Bakradze took an all-or-nothing approach in calling for a MAP.

“Any artificial mechanisms, which will be invented specifically for Georgia and Ukraine and which will be something between an Intensified Dialogue, where we are currently, and MAP, where we want to move to, are unacceptable for us,” he told journalists after returning from Brussels, where he met NATO officials.

He also said that NATO membership would help Tbilisi resolve the Abkhaz and South Ossetian separatist conflicts, an issue that some member states say should preclude Georgia from aspiring to join the alliance.

Earlier this month German Chancellor Angela Merkel remarked that countries “enmeshed in regional conflicts shouldn’t try to become [NATO] members,” the Bloomberg news agency reported.

Last week Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov warned Tbilisi not to play a “very dangerous game” by involving its separatist conflicts in discussions about NATO membership.