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Former Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili has been arrested after returning eight years from voluntary slavery, the country’s prime minister on Friday, which is set to escalate unrest in the Caucasus.
Prime Minister Irakli Garibashvili, whose Georgia party Dream fired Saakashvili in 2013, said the former president was arrested in Tbilisi, the capital, after secretly leaving Ukraine.
Saakashvili said this week he would return to Georgia, despite the risk of arrest after being convicted of two counts of alleged political offenses.
In a video released Friday morning, Saakashvili walked around a tree-lined boulevard in the Black Sea city of Batumi, urging his followers to get rid of Georgia’s Dreams in Saturday’s election.
Saakashvili’s arrest was not immediately known. Georgian officials initially denied being in the country with pictures of Saakashvili in chains, smiling as police escorted him out of the house, shown on state television.
Garibashvili said Georgian lawmakers had chosen a place and time to arrest Saakashvili “in order to overcome obstacles”.
Beka Basilaia, Saakashvili’s lawyer, confirmed his arrest, telling Ukrainian television that it was politically motivated.
Georgia, a mountainous country of less than 4m, was once considered a model of how post-Soviet countries could change and move westward. Now there are political tensions between the ruling party and the billionaire and Saakashvili’s United National Movement.
The United National Movement has asked its supporters to take part in the elections against the Georgian Dream. The ruling party will be forced to hold early elections next year if it wins less than 43% of the vote in urban elections.
Ukraine says it wants to understand the arrest of Saakashvili, who has taken Ukrainian citizens and owns them task advisor to the country’s President Volodymyr Zelensky.
Zelensky “is concerned about such issues. . . “Ukraine has asked the Georgian side to report any wrongdoing against Ukrainian citizens,” said Serhiy Nykyforov, a spokesman for Ukraine’s president.
Saakashvili has been involved in violent politics since he ousted his leader on the anti-corruption platform in the 2003 Rose Revolution.
Initially he won praise for his success in clearing connections and entertaining those who give to the west and economic transformation. But his bid did not go down well with Georgia’s voters.
After years of bolstering Georgia’s interest in joining the EU and Nato, she once again lost her faith in the face of numerous Western allies as she led a four-day defeat in Russia in 2008.
Founder of Georgia Dream Bidzina Ivanishvili, a former economist, who was the richest man in Russia in the 1990s, ousted Saakashvili’s party from power in the 2012 parliamentary elections.
Saakashvili left the country a year after his term expired and moved to Ukraine, where he sold his experience in fighting corruption and dealing with pressure from Moscow as an asset to his changed government.
Petro Poroshenko, President of Ukraine from 2014 to 2019 and a Saakashvili colleague at the university, granted him citizenship and made him the regional ambassador before the two men met.
They were deprived of their citizenship and deported from Ukraine but under the leadership of Zelensky they re-acquired Ukrainian citizens and began advising the government on reforms.
Davit Sakvarelidze, a trustee, said on Ukrainian television on Friday that Saakashvili “wants to join the war” in Georgia.