Ukraine blocks train as stateless Saakashvili attempts re-entry
PRZEMYSL: Ukrainian authorities on Sunday blocked a train in Poland carrying stateless former Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili as the firebrand politician attempted to return to Ukraine to reclaim his citizenship there, stripped by President Petro Poroshenko in a bitter row.
A statement by Ukrainian police read to an AFP journalist aboard the Kiev-bound train in Przemysl, southern Poland, said it would “not leave the station so long as people without the right to return to Ukraine will be on board.”
Saakashvili refused to get off, telling journalists that “taking a whole train hostage is ridiculous” and accusing Poroshenko of making Ukraine “a laughing stock to the whole world.”
Ukraine’s outspoken ex-Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko threw her support behind Saakashvili earlier on Sunday, meeting the 49-year-old exile in the southern Polish town of Rzeszow as he headed by bus to the KorczowaKrakovets border crossing.
Saakashvili however then opted to take the train, insisting that “several hundred thugs were mobilized by the Ukrainian government to stop several thousand” of his supporters waiting to greet him on the Ukrainian side of the border.
The Kiev government is “panicking,” Saakashvili said, adding that he did “not want to overthrow President Poroshenko” but just defend his rights.
“We believe in the fact that Mikheil Saakashvili can lead our country out of the crisis,” Lyudmyla Goretska, one of thousands of supporters waiting in Krakovets on the Ukrainian side of the border, told AFP.
“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.”