NATO officials are in Georgia doing the preliminary work to set up a training facility, an official from the alliance said on a visit to Tbilisi.
The establishment of the joint training facility, announced in September, was the main component of the "substantial package" that NATO had long promised Georgia for continuing to be a good ally. James Appathurai, NATO's special representative for the Caucasus and Central Asia, was in Tbilisi this week meeting with officials including Prime Minister Irakli Garibashvili to discuss the implementation of the package.
“We welcome very much the speed with which Georgia has been working to define this new joint training center,” Appathurai said, according to Civil.ge, and he added that NATO defense planning experts are already in Georgia, working closely with the Georgian colleagues on this issue.
"NATO is already participating very actively and we are already identifying the people who will be coming in here, defining where the joint training center will be – that’s a Georgian decision of course, hopefully we can define it together," Appathurai said. "There will be further high-level visits to focus on implementation.”
Appathurai's visit followed a visit two weeks ago by Garibashvili to NATO headquarters in Brussels, where NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said that the package will "move Georgia closer to NATO":
