Georgian Ambassador to Ukraine Zakarashvili will leave the country on July 6

Georgian Ambassador to Ukraine Giorgi Zakarashvili said he would leave the country on July 6. About this he told in an interview with Rustavi 2 TV channel.

According to him, the 48 hours that the Ukrainian authorities gave him to leave for Tbilisi expire at noon on July 6. “The countdown began after my meeting yesterday. Roughly speaking, it will take 48 hours until 12 o’clock tomorrow. Naturally, I will try to leave the territory of Ukraine before 12 noon tomorrow,” Zakarashvili said. But, according to him, the departure is fraught with a number of difficulties, since now you can only leave Kiev by train or car.

Ambassador also addedthat despite the ultimatum given to him by the Ukrainian authorities, Georgia is not at the stage of severing diplomatic relations with Ukraine. “As the Foreign Ministry noted, this is an escalation of relations. If we take into account the fact that the Ukrainian side did not have an ambassador in Georgia for a long time, then it is theoretically possible to reduce the level of diplomatic relations, the next stage of which is the rupture of relations. However, we are not at the bottom yet, since there is an accredited ambassador in Georgia, although not in Ukraine, but invited for consultations,” Zakarashvili said.

On July 4, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine on behalf of the President of the country Volodymyr Zelensky expressed strongly protested to the Georgian ambassador over the situation around former President Mikheil Saakashvili and called on the Georgian authorities to send the politician to Kyiv for further treatment. The Ukrainian Foreign Ministry also ordered the ambassador to leave the country within 48 hours for consultations with the Georgian authorities.

The Georgian Foreign Ministry called this decision an extreme form of aggravation of relations with Ukraine. Office considered such a demand as interference in the internal affairs of Georgia.

In May, the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) in Strasbourg rejected lawsuit by Saakashvili’s lawyers to transfer the former president to a foreign clinic for treatment. On July 3, for the first time in a long time, the former president remotely participated in a meeting of the Tbilisi City Court, where he showed his emaciated body and called on the Georgian authorities to apologize for bringing him to such a state.

Saakashvili, who served as President of Georgia from 2004 to 2013, faces several criminal cases in the country, in two of which he was sentenced to a total of nine years in prison.