Georgia launches joint drills with five NATO countries

Georgian troops on Wednesday launched joint military exercises with United States marines and soldiers from four Eastern European NATO members, the pro-Western ex-Soviet nation's defence ministry said.

The drills dubbed "Agile Spirit 2015" are part of a "substantive package" of measures aimed at bringing Georgia -- which has long sought full NATO membership -- closer to the US-led alliance's standards, the ministry said in a statement.

"One of the priority areas of the package is the holding of NATO exercises on Georgian territory," the ministry said.

Georgia -- which lost a brief war with Moscow in 2008 -- has been rattled by Russia's seizure of Ukraine's Crimea peninsula and alleged fuelling of a separatist conflict in the east of the country.

Some 220 US marines and platoon-sized Bulgarian, Latvian, Lithuanian and Romanian units will hold the two-week exercises at the Vaziani base outside the Georgian capital Tbilisi with soldiers from the Georgian army's 4th mechanised brigade, according to the ministry.

Georgia's bid to join NATO and the European Union infuriated its former imperial master Russia, which bitterly opposes the alliance's expansion into former Soviet republics.

In August 2008 Georgia fought and lost a brief war with Russia over the Kremlin-backed separatist region of South Ossetia.

Just ahead of the war, NATO leaders agreed at a summit in Bucharest that Georgia would one day join the alliance, but did not put the country on a formal path to eventual membership.