Saakashvili returns to Georgia: circles within circles of coups, corruption, crime and armed conflict
President Warns Against Unrest Amid Reports of Saakashvili’s Arrival
President Salome Zurabishvili warned today against unrest as reports of the arrival of Ex-President Mikheil Saakashvili in Georgia have stirred confusion on the eve of the municipal elections.
Saakashvili and Zurabishvili were two-thirds of the triumvirate that assumed power after the so-called Rose Revolution of late 2003. The third, Zurab Zhvania, was found dead in 2005, with his family claiming he had been assassinated.
Mikheil Saakashvili began his college education in Ukraine, where he graduated in 1992 from the University of Kiev. While at that school he was a personal friend of Petro Poroshenko, later first head of state of post-coup Ukraine in 2014.
He then received a State Department fellowship to study at the Columbia Law School and (is reported to have) attended classes at the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia – where Zbigniew Brzezinski taught at the time – and the George Washington University Law School.
Just months after becoming the head of the Georgian junta, he threatened war against independent Adjara and in 2008 invaded South Ossetia, triggering a five-day war with Russia. (The first major American official to arrive in Georgia after the war, within just five days of its end, was then Senator Joseph Biden, who pledged $1 billion dollars in aid.) Under his leadership Georgia, with a population of under four million, was the third-largest troop contributor for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, only the U.S. and Britain providing more. During the 2008 war with Russia the Pentagon airlifted all 2,000 Georgian troops in Iraq back to Georgia to participate in the conflict.
He was also a key advisor to the forces backing Viktor Yushchenko during the so-called Orange Revolution in Ukraine a year after Georgia’s Rose Revolution, the second imitating the first in most every particular.
After his party lost power in 2013 he was questioned on several charges, including the death of his fellow Rose Revolution conspirator Zhvania.
He fled Georgia and was convicted and sentenced in absentia for abuse of power.
Saakashvili arrived in Ukraine in time for the U.S.-engineered coup of February 2014, which he actively supported. That violent uprising, like its prototype the Rose Revolution of 2003, also lead to war, a war in the Donbass that persists to this day and is intensifying daily.
The following year his former university friend Poroshenko appointed him head of the International Advisory Council on Reforms (while he was wanted in his homeland on numerous charges of corruption) and then the governor of the Odessa Oblast. Pro forma, he was made a Ukrainian citizen the day before the second appointment. (Which necessitated his renouncing his Georgian citizenship, as Ukraine doesn’t allow dual citizenship, a measure aimed solely against Russian speakers.) He claimed he was also offered the position of First Vice Prime Minister of Ukraine. The government of Georgia formally stripped him of citizenship in 2015.
He broke with his erstwhile friend and political colleague Poroshenko the following year and created – with who knows whose funding – an opposition political party called Movement of New Forces.
In 2017 Poroshenko, in an act of internecine political bloodletting emblematic of the past 21 years of “color revolutions” of which Saakashvili’s own was the original (though modeled on the 1999 coup in Yugoslavia directed in large part by Otpor, which trained Saakashvili’s Kmara stormtroopers), stripped Saakashvili of his Ukrainian citizenship, thus rendering him a man without a country, a stateless person. He left for Poland and then Lithuania, finally returning, illegally, to Ukraine. He was detained by the government and deported to Poland.
However, in 2019 President Volodymyr Zelensky restored his Ukrainian citizenship and Saakashvili returned to Ukraine yet again.
Last year Zelensky appointed Saakashvili head of the Executive Committee of the National Reform Council.
He is reported to have returned to Georgia today.
Anti-bellum 