Tbilisi will boycott the next year’s Winter Olympics in Russia’s Sochi if the participation becomes a “humiliating” experience for Georgia, the country’s prime minister said on Monday.
The Games will be held in Sochi, near Russia’s border with the breakaway region of Abkhazia, which Georgia claims as part of its territory but Russia considers independent and maintains a large military presence there.
“We should see how the situation evolves. And if we feel before the Games that the participation is humiliating for us, then, of course, we won’t take part,” Bidzina Ivanishvili said in an interview with Georgian Public Broadcaster’s First Channel.
The question of a boycott has repeatedly arisen in Georgia as a result of the 2008 war with the host nation, Russia. Outgoing Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili had urged the world to consider snubbing the event, but after his party lost parliamentary elections in October 2012, relations between Georgia and Russia began to improve, Ria Novosti informs.
