Jacek Czaputowicz said: "Today, on the tenth anniversary of these events, we are travelling to Georgia together with the foreign ministers of Lithuania and Latvia ... to jointly commemorate the victims of the war and in a gesture of solidarity with the Georgian state and people.”
Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Pavlo Rozenko would join the foreign ministers in Georgia, Czaputowicz added.
The joint trip to Tbilisi follows in the footsteps of the late Polish President Lech Kaczyński, who in August 2008 organised a visit in support of Georgia.
Kaczyński was at the time accompanied by the presidents of Estonia, Lithuania and Ukraine and the prime minister of Latvia, the foreign ministry in Warsaw noted in a statement ahead of Monday’s trip.
“Taken at a time when Russian tanks were advancing on the Georgian capital, this courageous decision by President Lech Kaczyński contributed to stopping the invasion,” the Polish foreign ministry said.
It added: “Unfortunately, President Kaczyński’s words spoken on 12 August 2008 in Tbilisi are still topical ten years on: ‘Today it is Georgia, tomorrow it will be Ukraine, the day after tomorrow the Baltic States, and perhaps... next... in line will be my country, Poland’.”
The two-day visit starting on Monday was to include meetings with Georgia’s president, prime minister, parliamentary speaker and foreign minister, and a trip to the administrative boundary line with the separatist region of Tskhinvali/South Ossetia, according to the foreign ministry in Warsaw.
Czaputowicz was also to lay a wreath at a monument to President Lech Kaczyński in the Georgian capital, Tbilisi.
Lech Kaczyński died on April 10, 2010, when a Polish plane carrying him, his wife, and 94 others, mainly political and military top brass, crashed while trying to land at the Smolensk airfield in western Russia. All aboard were killed.
(pk/gs)
Source: PAP, msz.gov.pl