Georgia: Tbilisi Wants NATO Membership for Protection against Mistral Sales

France's confirmation of plans to sell high-end warships to Moscow is prompting Tbilisi to renew calls for its admission into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Tbilisi says NATO membership would offer protection against a heightened security threat posed by Russia.

Shrugging off warnings from the Pentagon and France's fellow members in NATO, French President Nicolas Sarkozy -- speaking during a March 1 press conference with Russian President Dmitri Medvedev in Paris -- revealed that the French government has entered into "exclusive negotiations" with Moscow about the sale of four Mistral-class helicopter carriers to Russia. The purchase price of one Mistral-class vessel is estimated at $600 million.

"I expect that these negotiations will meet with success," Sarkozy said, as quoted by Russia's RIA-Novosti agency. The French leader said that the ships would be sold "without military equipment;" his meaning was not immediately clear.

Tbilisi argues that the deal contradicts France's obligations as the broker for the cease-fire terms that ended the 2008 Georgia-Russia war. Russian officials earlier stated that they could have achieved their military goals in Georgia within 40 minutes if they had had a Mistral-class warship.
"Georgia must be accepted into NATO promptly, as we can't compete with Russia in arms purchases," Georgian State Minister for Reintegration Issues Temur Iakobashvili was quoted by the Inter Press News agency as saying on March 2.

France has pursued the deal as a way to give a boost to its flagging armaments industry, French media have reported. [For details, see the Eurasia Insight archive.]

But in February 27 remarks to the French daily Le Monde, French Secretary of State for European Affairs Pierre Lellouche spun the sale as an attempt by Paris to put a final end to Cold War tensions. "We have nothing to hide. Our move is first of all political," Lellouche was quoted by the paper as saying. "If we want to turn the page on the Cold War, we cannot place Russia under an embargo, all the while pretending to treat it as a friend and partner. Common strategic interests override the differences of yesterday."

Talks on the technical aspects of the sale have not yet begun, he added. President Medvedev appeared to second Lellouche's line of thinking, calling the deal on March 1 "a symbol of the trust between our countries" that Moscow would like "to create in cooperation with other countries."