Outgoing Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili assailed Russia as “the last authoritarian empire in the world” during a speech to the UN General Assembly, and predicted that President Vladimir Putin would disappear from Russian politics, prompting the Russian delegation to walk out in protest.
Russia’s ambassador to the UN, Vitaly Churkin, decried Saakashvili’s remarks as “crazy fabrications” and even “anti-Christian,” and said the Georgian leader needed psychological help.
Saakashvili, whose second and final term ends next month, warned that the Kremlin was using “constant pressures and threats” to establish a new Russian empire through the proposed Eurasian Union, a political and economic bloc of former Soviet republics.
“It makes me sick when KGB officer Vladimir Putin lectures the world about freedom, values and democracy,” Saakashvili said. “But this new project [the Eurasian Union] is much more dangerous than his lectures.
“The Eurasian Union has been shaped as an alternative to the European Union and unveiled by Vladimir Putin as the main project of his new presidency — the new Russian empire,” he said in his 30-minute address.
Putin first floated the idea of the Eurasian Union in October 2011, saying it would build upon the “best values of the Soviet Union,” and Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan subsequently signed an agreement to establish the grouping by 2015. Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan have expressed interest in joining, and in a victory for the Kremlin, Armenia’s president agreed to sign up after holding talks with Putin in Moscow earlier this month.
