Georgian Prime Minister Mamuka Bakhtadze has sent his condolences over the death of former Indiana Senator Richard Lugar.
Lugar, a foreign policy expert who served in the US Senate for 36 years and helped lead the dismantling process of thousands of nuclear warheads and missiles from former Soviet states, passed away at the age of 87 on Sunday.
Bakhtadze wrote on his official Twitter account that world had lost a great statesman and Georgia is forever grateful to him.
World has lost a great statesman, who has been instrumental in American foreign policy for decades. Sen. Richard Lugar was a great friend of ???????? & will always stay in our memories as a person who has made a world a better place. ???????? is forever grateful.
— Mamuka Bakhtadze (@BakhtadzeMamuka) April 28, 2019
Lugar’s non-profit organisation, the Lugar Center, says he died of complications from chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy, an illness which attacks the nerves.
Tbilisi is host to the Lugar Lab, officially called the Center for Public Health Research, which is named after former American Senator Richard Lugar.
It became operational in 2013. The centre is run by Georgia’s National Centre for Disease Control (NCDC), under the Georgian Ministry of Labour, Health and Social Affairs.