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KIEV, October 1. / TASS /. Former Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili’s head of office in Kiev, Maria Barabash, said there was no evidence of his detention in Georgia and called reports of his arrest a provocation.
“There is no evidence of Mikhail’s detention. I think this is a provocation to get him to connect to the Internet,” she told RBC news agency on Friday. Ukraine.
Saakashvili wrote on Facebook on Friday that he had returned to his homeland eight years after leaving. He later released a video recording claiming he was in Batumi, Georgia. After a few hours Georgian Prime Minister Irakli Garibashvili announced that Saakashvili had been arrested and taken to an appropriate detention center.
Saakashvili was President of Georgia from January 2004 to November 2013. In 2013, he left the country a few days before his presidential term expired. As a result, four criminal cases were opened against him with verdicts rendered on two of them. In January 2018, the Tbilisi City Court sentenced Saakashvili in absentia to three years in prison for the 2006 murder of Sandro Girgvliani, an employee of Georgian United Bank. In June 2018, the court sentenced him to six years in prison for the 2005 assault on lawmaker Valery Gelashvili.
In 2015, then Ukrainian President Pyotr Poroshenko invited Saakashvili to his country by granting him citizenship and appointing him as governor of the Odessa region. In July 2017, following a conflict, Poroshenko revoked Ukrainian citizenship of Saakashvili, after which the politician was expelled from Ukraine. In May 2019, Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky returned citizenship to Saakashvili, who returned to Ukraine and was appointed in one year to head the executive committee of the National Reform Council of Ukraine.
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