Whichever way you look at the situation surrounding ex-Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, who re-entered Ukraine on Sept. 10, two months after President Petro Poroshenko stripped him of his citizenship, the spectacle is unedifying.
It another sad indictment of Ukraine’s political class.
Ukraine has so many bigger priorities than this, and its politicians need to get on with passing key reforms to get the stalled International Monetary Fund program back on track, including pension reform and land reform.
It’s strange that Saakashvili and Poroshenko were ex-university buddies, and Poroshenko brought Saakashvili in to run the Odesa Oblast administration and show that Ukraine could roll out an anti-graft agenda. Odesa is renowned for organized crime so the assumption was that if Saakashvili could roll out his Georgia style anti-graft reforms, there then it could be done anywhere in Ukraine. Saakashvili, though, largely failed in Odesa – he claims for a lack of support at the national government level. Therein he made some pretty strident claims of graft in the Poroshenko administration and likely earned many enemies as a result – prime therein Interior Minister Arsen Avakov. It is likely that pulling his passport was payback from these same forces.
It’s notable though that aligned now behind Saakashvili is a hodgepodge of opposition forces, including Yulia Tymoshenko and the Lviv Mayor Andriy Sadoviy. Tymoshenko and Poroshenko were arch-enemies during the Viktor Yushchenko era when they served in the same administration but fought tooth and nail, and Sadoviy has been a target of political games by the Poroshenko camp to undermine his own popularity in the run up to the 2019 elections.
There is also talk of the oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky lining up with Saakashvili, Tymoshenko and Sadoviy now, with Kolomoisky seeking payback against Poroshenko for the nationalisation of PrivatBank earlier in the year.
Saakashvili and Kolomoisky make strange bedfellows, but this is Ukraine, where shifting political allegiances are the name of the political game. But Poroshenko does seem to be moving against potential political opponents in the run-up to the 2019 elections – Sadoviy, Saakashvili and elements in the Opposition Party. Others in opposition seem to align behind Poroshenko, including the oligarch Rinat Akhmetov, albeit he likely will be keeping all sides sweet as usual and trying to play all sides. Recent energy sector privatizations played out quite well for Akhmetov, which likely assured the relationship with Poroshenko.
The West must be struggling now to figure out who to support, given that Saakashvili was the poster boy for the U.S. under President George W .Bush, while Tymoshenko has been working overtime to use existing contacts in the Republican Party – and having managed to meet U.S. President Donald J. Trump before Poroshenko. Poroshenko hardly helped his cause in the Trump White House by being so open in his support for Hillary Rodham Clinton in the U.S. elections.
The big winner in all this is President Vladimir Putin in Russia, as his long time nemesis, Saakashvili, could end up getting detained in Ukraine and deported to Georgia. He also sees the Ukrainian political class in turmoil which he will argue before the Russian electorate in next years presidential elections there shows the advantages of its sovereign democratic model. I guess the big plus in all this is while the Ukrainian political scene is in such a state of flux Moscow will hardly feel the need to flex its military muscle again imminently in Ukraine – despite those concerns that the Zapad 2017 Russian military exercises is a cover for something more sinister. This again affirms the need for Ukraine to use this window to push on with much needed economic reform.
