Tactical exercises with a participation of the American warship Mount Whitney are going on in the Georgian area of the Black Sea. On Sunday American and Georgian military divers conducted joint dives, trained mechanisms of emergency announcement, shooting, and so on. On Tuesday a French ship Premier-Maitre L’Her joined them, according to the embassy of France to Tbilisi, the ship trained grappling.
NATO’s ships are conducting tactical exercises with participation of Georgian officers and soldiers, despite the fact that Georgia has no Navy. The Russian Air Forces and troopers who came to the Poti Port destroyed the majority of warships during the military conflict in 2008. The rest of them moved to Batumi. The Russian Forces didn’t go to Adjara due to the international agreement on a status of the Adjara Autonomous Republic with Turkey. However, a year later President Saakashvili decided to give all remained warships to the Coast Guard of the border police of the Georgian Interior Ministry.
The most interesting thing is not military, but political content of NATO’s visit. Premier Georgi Kvirikashvili visited the exercises and participated in a state reception on board of Mount Whitney. He said that the visit and joint tactical exercises were another confirmation of ‘the firm support by the U.S.’
Obviously, Mount Whitney is not just a ship of the American Navy, but a command and staff carrier – a fleet leader of the U.S. Sixth Fleet, which is dislocated in the Mediterranean Sea where the geopolitical situation over Syria has been stirred up. The fact that the command of the fleet decided to head to the Black Sea and stay in Georgia for a long time means one thing only: the U.S. military and political leadership considers situations in the Mediterranean Sea and the Black Sea as interconnected ones.
Otherwise, it is difficult to explain why the command and staff carrier of the Sixth Fleet of the U.S., as well as a warship of the French Navy which was actively participating in the Syrian affairs, are doing machine-gun shooting, joint diving, and holding banquets for the political leadership of Georgia, maneuvering with small boats of the Georgian Coast Guard, while a global conflict can emerge at any moment in the Mediterranean Sea.
Mount Whitney was the ship that came to Poti (not long before a withdrawal of Russian troops) during military activities over South Ossetia. The ‘American’ brought humanitarian aid to Georgia, while the Russian Foreign Ministry voiced protest. Even though the U.S. leadership didn’t consider a possibility of interference to the military conflict against a nuclear power, the significant redeployment of the fleet leader played a certain role in the further development, i.e. in signing an agreement between Sarkozy and Medvedev on August 12, 2008.
At least the former President and governor of the Odessa Oblast, Mikhail Saakashvili, permanently states that the Russian leadership planned an occupation of Tbilisi. “Putin wanted to hang me up,” Saakashvili told everybody.
It’s also peculiar that the American fleet leader came to the Black Sea after the NATO summit in Warsaw, where a suggestion by the U.S. to form a joint navy group of NATO and Georgia and Ukraine wasn’t supported, primarily due to Germany’s rejection. Berlin reasonably referred to a risk of a conflict with Russia in the Black Sea. None of German warships has even visited the Georgian seashore over the last 25 years.
