For someone who has had the door slammed in his face, Mikheil Saakashvili is filled with confidence. But has he ever behaved differently in public? On a recent August 13 evening, Europe’s best-known stateless statesman walked smilingly into a narrow assembly room in southern Warsaw. He shook hands as he walked through the crowd before stepping onto the podium, reaching into his jacket pocket and pulling out a small blue booklet.
“This passport,” he said in Ukrainian, “is not the plaything of individual oligarchs, who issue it and then retract it, declare it invalid or use it to blackmail you.” And because he is not the only one who thinks so, he went on, he was able to use this passport to travel from the United States to Poland, despite the bullying from the Ukrainian leadership.
