Giorgi Kalatozishvili, Tbilisi. Exclusively for Vestnik Kavkaza
The former president of Georgia, Mikheil Saakashvili, who is an advisor to President of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko and the head of the International Consultative Council for Reforms, has recently visited areas of the Donetsk Region controlled by the Armed Forces of Ukraine. Saakashvili has traditionally turned such visits into a show. He wore a camouflage coat and helmet; sitting in an armored vehicle, he posed for photos with soldiers with arms and grenade launchers; he distributed autographs to soldiers and officers and publicly urged them ‘to show heroism, defending the territorial integrity and sovereignty of Ukraine.’
Of course, nobody authorized him to participate in the ‘antiterrorist operation’ from the Kiev authorities, but he is openly playing a game, hoping for a return to power in Georgia. The former president is focused on involving Georgian soldiers in the military action, stressing that the contribution by former Georgian soldiers who have joined the Ukrainian Armed Forces is bigger than the contribution by representatives of other countries.
Recently, Saakashvili met dozens of Georgian soldiers in Kiev – in his office on the third floor of the presidential administration; he gave them Easter presents and prayed with them in the Kiev Nativity Church.
Nobody is hiding that almost all the Georgians who are fighting in Donbas (there are more than 100 of them) have come to Ukraine following an urge by the former president. According to Saakashvili’s initiative, the Ukrainian Defense Ministry invited the former head of the general staff of the Georgian Armed Forces, Gigi Kalandadze, ordering him to establish a special training center for Ukrainian soldiers. There is no information on the place where the center is situated, but it is clearly situated near battlefields.
Moreover, according to Saakashvili’s advice, Kiev invited engineers of the Georgian enterprise of Delta to establish production of unmanned aircraft, which played a very important role in the conflict.
The visit by the former president to the action area coincided with the death of another Georgian ‘volunteer’: a former soldier of the special unit of the Georgian Interior Ministry, Giorgi Djanelidze, died during a battle for Shirokino in the east of Ukraine. Djanelidze became the third Georgian soldier to die in Donbas, after Alexander Grigolashvili and Tamaz Sukhitashvili. Mikheil Saakashvili was the first to inform the world about the deaths of these soldiers on his Facebook page, stressing that he personally followed the participation of Georgian soldiers in the military actions.
Meanwhile, Tbilisi is following the military-political activity of Saakashvili with growing concern: the former speaker of the parliament, Nino Burdzhanadze, warns that the former president ‘is training his terrorists in Ukraine to return him to power in Georgia by force.’ The official authorities are not so radical in their statements, but Premier Irakli Garibashvili has postponed his visit to Kiev, hinting at ‘the unfriendly character’ of some decisions by the Ukrainian authorities regarding Saakashvili, against whom four criminal cases have been initiated.
