Ukraine’s last best hope
Mikheil Saakashvili is a reckless narcissist – but he might just transform the country
OWEN MATTHEWSBritish-Ukrainian Chamber of Commerce,
spoke optimistically of Odessa becoming
‘one of the richest cities in eastern and cen-
tral Europe’.
It didn’t happen. In November 2016,
Saakashvili and Lortkipanidze resigned
their posts, complaining that their efforts to
kill off Odessa’s crime syndicates had been
stymied by none other than Poroshenko
himself. Fighting dismal approval ratings
and an ongoing war against Russian-backed
separatists in Eastern Ukraine, Poroshen-
ko faced a choice between angering the
criminal clans on whose political support
he depended and supporting Saakashvi-
li’s house-cleaning campaign. Poroshenko
chose political expediency. Then, in late
July, Saakashvili — who studied law in Kievand speaks fluent Ukrainian as well as Rus-
sian — was stripped of his Ukrainian citi-
zenship on an obscure technicality while on
a speaking tour in America. That left him
officially stateless.
Saakashvili could easily have applied for
political asylum in any number of countries:
he has many powerful allies, including Ari-
zona senator John McCain, who described
him as ‘my great young Georgian friend’ in
a presidential foreign-policy debate against
Barack Obama in 2008. Instead he chose
to crash right back into Ukrainian poli-
tics — quite literally. Earlier this month
Saakashvili, accompanied by several hun-
dred supporters, a handful of European
parliamentarians and Ukrainian politicians,
attempted to cross the Polish-Ukrainian
frontier by train. Poroshenko mobilised a
large force of border guards to stop him.
Abandoning the train, the Saakashvili party
boarded buses and tried another crossing,
which they were told was closed because
of a bomb threat. Undeterred, they head-
ed for a third border control point, where
around 100 supporters formed a flying
wedge with Saakashvili at its centre andou have to hand it to Mikheil
Saakashvili: the man doesn’t give up.
After a tumultuous nine years as pres-
ident of Georgia, which began with a furious
anti-corruption purge, culminated in a short
but disastrous war with Russia in 2008 and
ended with accusations of embezzlement
and authoritarian practices, he is deter-
mined to return to power — not in his own
country, but in Ukraine.
Saakashvili is brilliant and divisive.
His many fans, principally drawn from
the educated and the young of Georgia
and Ukraine, see him as exactly the kind
of clear-thinking, fearless leader who can
sweep away the tangle of cronyism that has
turned most former Soviet states into klep-
tocratic autocracies. To the sceptics, who
include the many hundreds of thousands of
officials he has put out of a job, he’s a reck-
less risk-taker who provoked Russia into
invading the breakaway Georgian territo-
ries of Abkhazia and South Ossetia in 2008.
They also accuse him of being a relentless
self-publicist more interested in showboat-
ing than actually making things work.
Having spent time with Saakashvili
(at the presidential palace in Tbilisi during
the war, where I scribbled furiously to keep
up with his mile-a-minute conversation
as he drank red wine with correspondents
late into the night, and later in New York,
where he transformed himself into a Wil-
liamsburg hipster during a brief post-presi-
dential retirement), I have come to believe
that both sides are right. Saakashvili com-
bines high principle with almost manic
personal ambition, rashness with ironclad
self-belief. It makes him both one of the
most inspiring and flawed political figures
of modern times.
Saakashvili stepped down as President
of Georgia in 2013, his once-popular party
destroyed in the polls. The regime which
succeeded him, in classic post-Soviet fash-
ion, brought a slew of embezzlement and
abuse-of-office charges against Saakash-
vili, and stripped him of his Georgian cit-
izenship. But in 2015 his political career
was re-launched when Ukrainian Presi-
dent (and chocolate billionaire) Petro
Poroshenko offered Saakashvili the
post of governor of the Odessa region.
Ukraine is one of the most corrupt
countries in the world, tying last year with
Russia for 131st place out of 176 on Trans-
parency International’s Corruption Percep-
tions Index. And Odessa is the most corrupt
region of Ukraine; in fact, the multi-ethnic
port city has been famous for its criminality
pretty much since its foundation by a half-
Spanish, half-Irish mercenary-adventurer
in 1794. Saakashvili swept in on Odessa’s
crooks like a righteous avenger. In Georgia,
he reformed the crooked traffic police by
firing every single officer, and he cleaned up
corruption in the port of Poti by temporar-
ily scrapping customs duties altogether.
Saakashvili believed that the same zero-
tolerance tactics would work in Odessa. He
appointed Yulia Marushevska, a 27-year-old
political activist, as director of the mafia-
controlled port and installed a high-tech
system for tracking all shipments and cus-
toms payments that was publicly accessible,
in real time, online. Saakashvili also got an
old ally from Georgia, Giorgi Lortkipan-
idze, appointed chief of police. He drafted
in foreign advisers to help his anti-corrup-
tion effort, including an anti-fraud officer
from the City of London Police and an offi-
cial of the EU border agency. Bate Toms, an
American-born lawyer and chairman of theSaakashvili combines high principle
with almost manic personal ambition,
ra shn ess with iron cl a d self-belief