Former Georgian president and Ukrainian politician Mikheil Saakashvili, freed by his supporters after police in Kyiv bungled his arrest on Dec. 5, has now marched on parliament and called on his supporters to oust President Petro Poroshenko.
Earlier the day, the law enforcers arrested Saakashvili on the rooftop of his house, but he was freed by his supporters, who blocked the way of a police minivan in which police had attempted to transport the politician in an hours-long standoff. Eventually, Saakashvili’s supporters smashed the window of the van and freed him.
The protesters blocked hundreds of police and National Guards on Tryokhsvyatitelska Street, building barricades out of fences, garbage cans and stones and blocking the street with cars.
After being freed, Saakashvili gave a speech on the stairs of the Catholic cathedral on Kostelna Street and later marched with about a thousand supporters to Maidan Nezalezhnosti and then to the protest tent camp in front of the Verkhovna Rada.
At the protest camp, Saakashvili called for a large-scale protest on the evening of Dec. 5 to oust Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko, Interior Minister Arsen Avakov, and the whole ruling class.
“The people of Ukraine must gather and oust from power a criminal organization with a traitor of Ukraine, Poroshenko, atop it,” Saakashvili said, addressing his supporters outside parliament, which was being guarded by about 2,000 police, according to a Kyiv Post reporter.
The crowd chanted “Shame!” and “Impeachment!”
Saakashvili’s supporters interpreted the authorities’ attempt to arrest Poroshenko’s major political opponent as an effort to establish a dictatorship.
“Today we saw the way a dictatorship was being cemented in Ukraine and the way the rule of law was being violated,” Saakashvili’s lawyer Roman Chornolutsky said at a rally in front of the Verkhovna Rada.
Saakashvili claimed a criminal case opened against him had been fabricated on the personal orders of Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko.
Lutsenko earlier in the day said at a briefing in Kyiv that Saakashvili’s rallies were sponsored by runaway Ukrainian oligarch Serhiy Kurchenko, an ally of the ousted former President Viktor Yanukovych.
Lutsenko played what he said were intercepted phone conversations allegedly between Saakashvili and Kurchenko, adding that Kurchenko, who now lives in Russia, also cooperates with Russia’s FSB state security agency.
Prosecutors have opened a criminal probe against Saakashvili for cooperating with a criminal organization, for which he may face up to five years in jail, according to Lutsenko.
Saakashvili called the accusations of cooperation with Kurchenko or Russia “total nonsense,” adding that there is “no bigger enemy of (Russian dictator Vladimir) Putin” than him.
Saakashvili described his attempted arrest as retribution by the authorities for the rally he had led in Kyiv on Dec. 3 demanding Poroshenko’s impeachment.
Saakashvili said that the Ukrainian authorities had an agreement with Putin and Georgian oligarch Bidzina Ivanishvili to put him in jail in Georgia.
Saakashvili, who was the governor of Odesa Oblast in southern Ukraine in 2015 and 2016, has since become one of the most vehement critics of Poroshenko, accusing the president and his allies of rampant corruption.
“They have tried to silence the loudest voice who was saying that they (the authorities) are thieves,” Saakashvili said outside parliament.
Kyiv Post staff writers Veronika Melkozerova and Oleg Sukhov contributed reporting to this story.
