ODESA, Ukraine – Former Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, the ex-governor of Ukraine’s Odesa Oblast, returned to his former political base to hold a rally.
About 200 people attended the Sept. 30 demonstration in support of Saakashvili in central Odesa in front of the famous Potemkin staircase with its sweeping view of the Black Sea.
Representatives of Odesa’s AutoMaidan group turned on loud music in an apparent bid to interrupt the gathering.
Scuffles between Saakashvili supporters and the AutoMaidan then began, and the police created a cordon around the AutoMaidan protesters.
Saakashvili dismissed his opponents as titushki, or pro-government thugs. Odesa’s AutoMaidan, Self-Defense, and Civic Security Council patriotic groups have been accused of being financed by Odesa Mayor Hennady Trukhanov. They deny the allegation. Last year, they assaulted and dispersed a tent camp of anti-Trukhanov protesters.
Symbolically, Saakashvili was standing behind a monument to Duc de Richelieu, a French aristocrat and prime minister who was governor of Odesa in the early 19th century and has been compared to Saakashvili as another foreigner appointed to run the city.
“Once you have come to Odesa, it will be (in your life) forever. I can’t boast that I’m a third or fourth generation Odesa resident like many of you, but neither was he,” Saakashvili said at the demonstration, pointing to Richeliu’s statue.
Saakashvili’s visit comes as Odesa faces increasing instability, an echo of the time when he was appointed governor in May 2015, which had been preceded by a violent standoff between pro-Ukrainian and pro-Russian protesters in 2014. Recently, clashes between protesters and the police were triggered by a Sept. 15 fire at a children’s camp that killed three kids and a court decision on Sept. 18 to acquit 20 pro-Russian protesters and release five of them from custody on charges stemming from the May 2014 fire.
Trukhanov has been blamed by critics for the fire at the children’s camp.
“They stole all the money and built it out of the worst materials,” Saakashvili said at the rally, referring to the children’s camp. “Trukhanov went to Kyiv with a suitcase of cash that he had stolen from Odesa residents and gave it to (President Petro Poroshenko’s Deputy Chief of Staff Vitaly) Kovalchuk. And they agreed that they would play down this scandal.”
Trukhanov and the Presidential Administration have denied accusations of corruption.
After being appointed governor, Saakashvili announced an ambitious plan to root out corruption in the city. He built a center to speed up the provision of administrative services, started the creation of a graft-free customs terminal and began construction of a strategic highway to the Romanian border.
Poroshenko’s supporters accused Saakashvili of failing to complete his projects. Saakashvili resigned in November 2016, accusing Poroshenko and the central government of blocking his plans.
“I don’t need a single government job in Ukraine,” he said. “I dream only of one thing – replace the government in Kyiv because they prevented me from changing Odesa and then come back to Odesa and change it together with you.”
Saakashvili urged Odesa residents to attend an Oct. 17 rally that he and his allies are planning in Kyiv. The rally will be devoted to the establishment of anti-corruption courts, canceling lawmakers’ immunity from prosecution and adopting a new electoral law that would decrease oligarchs’ influence on elections.
Saakashvili said that Trukhanov is just “a small scoundrel who was a security guard of (Alexander) Angert and (Vladimir) Galanternik and cut off fingers in the 1990s.”
Trukhanov and Odesa businessmen Angert and Galanternik have been accused of spearheading corruption in Odesa and were members of a mafia gang in the 1990s, according to an Italian police dossier.
Documents published by Slidstvo.info show that Trukhanov owns a hidden network of offshore firms that control companies which have received city contracts. According to documents published by ex-Odesa Mayor Eduard Gurvits, ex-lawmaker Yegor Firsov, and Slidtsvo.info, Trukhanov also has Russian citizenship, which is banned by Ukrainian law for officials. Trukhanov, Angert and Galanternik deny accusations of wrongdoing.
“But Trukhanov is a small tentacle of a big squid in Kyiv,” Saakashvili said. “Until we cut off the main head, it doesn’t make sense to cut off small tentacles.”
Saakashvili said Trukhanov would be among the first ones to be jailed once an anti-corruption court is created.
“Recently an elephant was brought through the streets of Odesa and put in a cage,” he added. “Why should the elephant be there? Trukhanov and the whole city council should be in a cage.”
After the rally, Saakashvili walked around Odesa’s central streets surrounded by supporters. Later he came to Russov House, a historic 19th century landmark where a fire had just broken out. The house has experienced several fires in recent years in what critics suspect to be an effort to free up the area for a lucrative construction project.
Saakashvili was stripped of citizenship by Poroshenko in July in what he has called a measure that violates the Constitution, Ukrainian and international law and due process. He broke through the border on Sept. 10 and then launched a tour around Ukraine, rallying supporters.
Ukrainian authorities have so far refused to give Saakashvili documents specifying the grounds for his loss of citizenship.
“We will break through all the fences,” Saakashvili said at the rally. “We are not afraid of their barbed wire, titushki (pro-government thugs) and special forces… I want to be a free citizen of a post-kleptocratic Odesa where we will build a city of our dream.”
