Stateless Saakashvili to attempt Ukraine entry

PRZEMYSL, Poland: Stateless former Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili says he is determined to return to Ukraine yesterday, to reclaim the Ukrainian citizenship which was stripped from him, although he runs the risk of being arrested at Tbilisi’s request. In Ukraine, outspoken ex-prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko threw her support behind Saakashvili yesterday, meeting the 49-year-old firebrand in the southern Polish town of Rzeszow as he headed to the Korczowa border crossing where guards are expected to refuse him entry.

“We’ve come to defend Mikheil, but we’re also here to defend Ukraine,” Tymoshenko told reporters, comparing today’s Ukraine to that of pro-Russian former president Viktor Yanukovych, who was overthrown in 2014 following mass protests in Kiev. Saakashvili claimed that “several hundred thugs were mobilized by the Ukrainian government to stop several thousand” of his supporters waiting to greet him at the border. The Kiev government is “panicking,” Saakashvili said, adding that he did “not want to overthrow President (Petro) Poroshenko” but just to defend his rights.

‘Future president’? “We believe in the fact that Mikheil Saakashvili can lead our country out of the crisis,” Lyudmyla Goretska, a supporter who had traveled from the distant Kiev region, told AFP in Krakovets on the Ukrainian side of the border. “We do not need much, we see what he did in his own country (Georgia) and that’s enough for us,” Goretska said of Saakashvili, who set up the Movement of the New Forces political party in Ukraine. “The main problem in our country is corruption... We need to overcome the oligarchy.”

Another supporter, Maria, 49, who declined to give her surname, told AFP she believes “Saakashvili is the future president” of Ukraine. “I believe that he will change the situation in Ukraine, he will finish the war” with Russia. The charismatic Saakashvili is credited with pushing through pro-Western reforms in his native Georgia which he led from 2004 to 2013. He is currently wanted in his homeland for alleged abuse of power-something he denies-during a tumultuous nine years as president that saw him fight and lose a brief war against Russia in 2008. —AFP