TBILISI, JULY 26 2017 (The Bulletin) — Ukraine stripped former Georgian leader Mikheil Saakashvili of his citizenship, leaving the man once feted by US President George W. Bush as a beacon of democracy in the former Soviet Union effectively stateless.
Mr Saakashvili, 49, may now be forced to seek asylum in the United States, where he is thought to have friends, and where he fled to in 2013 after leaving the Georgian Presidential Palace at the end of his second and final term in office.
Ukrainian leader Petro Poroshenko, who returned from a trip to Georgia earlier in July, had once considered Mr Saakashvili as an ally against Russia and in May 2015 gave him a Ukrainian passport and made him the governor of the Odessa region. But the quarrelsome Mr Saakashvili fell out with his Ukrainian hosts and resigned in November last year to set up a new political party.
Ukrainian migration was coy on why Saakashvili had had his passport taken from him.
“According to the constitution of Ukraine, the President of Ukraine takes decisions on losses of Ukrainian citizenship based on the conclusions of the citizenship commission,” it said in a statement.
Mr Saakashvili shot to power in Georgia in 2003 through a peaceful revolution that ushered in his pro- Western government. In 2008, though, he lost credibility with Western allies and with domestic voters after he triggered a war with Russia.
In a Facebook message, Mr Saakashvili said that he was currently outside Ukraine and that he would fight attempts to block him from returning to Ukraine.
“Now there is an attempt under way to force me to become a refugee,” he said. “This will not happen!”
Since 2012, his United National Movement party that once dominated Georgian politics has been humiliated, losing two parliamentary elections heavily, a presidential election and most municipality councils. The Georgian authorities want to try Mr Saakashvili for various financial crimes, allegations he has denied.
ENDS
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(News report from Issue No. 337, published on July 27 2017)