In the first eight months of this year, trade with the Baltic countries accounted for 0.18 percent of Azerbaijan’s total trade turnover.
Day: September 19, 2025
Georgian Dream Interior Minister Geka Geladze met with Dmitry Gora, the Western-sanctioned head of Belarus’ Investigative Committee, during his visit to China, Belarusian authorities reported on September 18, while Georgian officials have remained silent about the trip.
According to the Telegram post by Belarus’s Investigative Committee, the parties discussed “issues related to the provision of legal assistance in criminal cases, possible areas for further cooperation, the digitization of investigative processes, the introduction of modern analytical tools, and the professional development of employees.”
Dmitry Gora has been sanctioned in the West, including by the United States and the European Union, for his role in human-rights abuses and the crackdown on civil society and opposition in Belarus.
The meeting follows longstanding concerns about security cooperation between Georgian and Belarusian officials. In 2016, Tbilisi and Minsk signed a controversial agreement providing for the exchange of state-security information and cooperation on issues such as crimes against the constitutional order, sovereignty, and territorial integrity, as well as transnational organized crime, terrorism, and the illicit circulation of weapons. The agreement entered into force in 2021.
In December 2024, the violent suppression of pro-EU protests by Georgian authorities sparked speculation that they may have sought guidance on crackdown tactics from their Belarusian counterparts.
Geladze traveled to China at the invitation of Chinese officials to attend the Global Public Security Cooperation Forum, an international conference focused on law enforcement and security. He also held bilateral meetings with China’s Public Security Minister Wang Xiaohong and Kazakhstan’s Interior Minister Yerzhan Sadenov. While the Georgian Interior Ministry reported the meetings with the Chinese and Kazakh officials, it had not disclosed the meeting with Gora at the time of publication.
The trip and meetings were met with condemnation in Georgia.
“The latest first trip of Georgia’s newly chosen so-called ‘minister of internal affairs’ takes him to China where he meets Belarus sanctioned counterpart. What better demonstration,” Salome Zurabishvili, Georgia’s fifth President, wrote on X, sharing the news about the U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee adopting the GD government’s non-recognition amendment for inclusion in the State Department Authorization Act.
She tagged U.S. Senator Marco Rubio and Representative Joe Wilson, the initiator of the non-recognition amendment, in her post.
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