Border guards fail to stop former Georgia leader’s return to Ukraine
MIKHEIL SAAKASHVILI, the former president of Georgia, who became governor of a Ukrainian region, managed to enter Ukraine last night despite chaotic attempts by authorities to keep him out of the country.
Mr Saakashvili, who rose to world prominence as the defiant Georgian leader during his country’s 2008 war with Russia, had been trying to get into Ukraine from Poland to contest the annulment of his Ukrainian citizenship by Petro Poroshenko, Ukraine’s president. This act had left him stateless – he had lost his Georgian citizenship when he became Ukrainian.
A crowd of his supporters swept him across the frontier and past official checks at a border crossing in southeast Poland.
The crowd’s behaviour appeared to be a response to the troops and barricades the Ukrainian border authorities had deployed in an attempt to stop Mr Saakashvili entering the country.
Earlier in the day, he had tried taking a train to Kiev from the eastern Polish town of Przemyśl.
This ended in failure after he, along with all the other passengers, was left stranded at the station after the train’s staff refused to start their journey unless someone “who has no legal grounds to enter Ukraine” got off.
“The Ukrainian authorities are behaving like savages who are hoping that I won’t be able to get into Ukraine and so will have to stay in Poland instead, but I’m not going to let that happen,” said Mr Saakashvili, before his supporters came to his rescue.
Once friends, Mr Poroshenko had invited Mr Saakashvili to Ukraine to help clean up the country’s notoriously corrupt state infrastructure.
But their relationship floundered on claims by Mr Saakashvili that the Ukrainian president was doing too little to fight corruption and that powerful vested interests were blocking his own attempts at reform.
Mr Poroshenko rescinded Mr Saakashvili’s Ukrainian citizenship in July for apparently failing to declare details of a criminal inquiry he was facing in Georgia when applying for Ukrainian citizenship.
In Georgia, Mr Saakashvili is wanted for alleged crimes related to a crackdown on a peaceful demonstration and a raid on the private television station in 2007. Mr Saakashvili denies all the charges. “I have a legal right to stay in Ukraine,” he told
The Telegraph before travelling to the border. “I don’t want to stay anywhere else. I want to go back.”