Politician shouts from rooftop, then freed by backers
MOSCOW — As president of Georgia, he survived a disastrous war with Russia. As a regional governor in Ukraine committed to fighting corruption, he clashed with just about everybody, including his estranged former ally, Ukraine’s president, Petro Poroshenko.
On Tuesday, Mikhail Saakashvili, a onetime darling of the West, took his high-wire political career to bizarre new heights when he climbed onto the roof of his fivestory apartment building in the center of Kiev, the Ukrainian capital, with law enforcement officers in hot pursuit. As a crowd of hundreds of supporters gathered below, he shouted insults at Ukraine’s leaders and, according to several local news outlets, threatened to jump if security agents tried to grab him.
Eventually dragged from the roof after denouncing Poroshenko as a traitor and a thief, the former Georgian leader was detained but then freed by his supporters, who, amid raucous scenes on the street, blocked a security-service van before it could take Saakashvili to a Kiev detention center and allowed him to escape.
With a Ukrainian flag draped across his shoulders and a pair of handcuffs still attached to one of his wrists, Saakashvili then led hundreds of supporters in a march across Kiev toward Parliament. Speaking through a bullhorn, he called for “peaceful protests” to remove Poroshenko from office.
Russia reveled in a spectacle that only buttressed its view that Ukraine is a chaotic shambles incapable of running its own affairs. State television repeatedly broadcast footage of Saakashvili screaming from the rooftop and of the melee on the street below. The Kremlin spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, took delight in mocking Saakashvili, telling journalists in Moscow, “You know, we’re not used to reacting to statements made by
people who are sitting on roofs.”
Seeking to explain why Ukraine’s security agency, the SBU, had tried to grab the former Georgian leader, Ukraine’s prosecutor general, Yuri Lutsenko, accused Saakashvili of assisting a criminal organization led by former president Viktor Yanukovych, the ousted pro-Russian president.
The move to arrest Saakashvili, Lutsenko told journalists in Kiev, “broke the plan of revenge by proKremlin forces.”
Ukrainian political rivals routinely accuse each other of working in cahoots with the Kremlin, whatever the reality of their affiliations. The prosecutor’s accusation that Saakashvili was
collaborating with Yanukovych seemed to be largely aimed at discrediting the former Georgian leader, who has attracted support in Ukraine by positioning himself as an uncompromising enemy of Russia, corruption and Poroshenko.
The day’s dizzying events marked a surprising twist in the tumultuous career of a former leader who has burned so many bridges over the years that, stripped of his citizenship by both Georgia and Ukraine, he is now stateless and effectively a refugee.
Saakashvili took to the roof in protest after Ukrainian prosecutors came to his apartment early Tuesday morning and demanded to search it. As a flash mob of supporters gathered on the street below, he gave a rambling speech from the rooftop, urging “all
Ukrainians to take to the streets and drive out the thieves.”
“They want to kidnap me, because I rallied to the Ukrainian people’s defense. They wanted to kidnap me unnoticed, but they failed to do this,” Saakashvili proclaimed.
As president of Georgia for nearly a decade, Saakashvili initially won plaudits in Washington and other Western capitals for rooting out corruption and turning his small nation into a rare success story among former Soviet lands. But his image as a heroic reformer lost much of its sheen after a 2008 war with Russia and waves of arrests that targeted not only the corrupt but also his political enemies.
He left Georgia in 2013 and in 2014 was appointed governor of Ukraine’s corrupt Odessa region.