Georgia is holding “preliminary talks” on U.S. involvement in the EU monitoring mission across breakaway Abkhazia and South Ossetia administrative borders, Giga Bokeria, the Georgian deputy foreign minister, told Reuters.

“It would mean including third parties in the mission,” Reuters quoted Bokeria. “We have talked with the Americans about it. Our talks are at a preliminary stage.”

He also said he "would not rule out" interest from Turkey to join 246 unarmed EU monitors.

Eka Tkeshelashvili, the secretary of Georgia’s National Security Council, told The New York Times that the U.S. and other non-EU members’ involvement would make it “politically very costly to Russia to do anything on the ground.”

“It has the potential for reaching a very tangible impact,” she was quoted. “It’s always very hard to think what are the red lines that ultimately Russia might respect, because we saw last year that it passed most of the red lines that we could have imagined.”

The New York Times also reported on July 20 quoting EU’s special representatives for South Caucasus, Peter Semneby, that EU had “taken note of the interest on the Georgian side,” but the decision was not yet formally on any agenda.

EU Monitoring Mission in Georgia (EUMM) has 246 unarmed observers on the ground monitoring situation across the breakaway region’s administrative boundary lines, but are not able to go inside the breakaway regions.