Thousands of protesters on Dec. 10 marched through downtown Kyiv, in what appeared to be the largest rally in Ukraine since 2014, to demand President Petro Poroshenko’s impeachment and the release of former Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, who was arrested on Dec. 8.
Saakashvili’s Movement of New Forces estimated the number of demonstrators at 50,000, while the Kyiv Post, using photographs and the Mapchecking application for estimating crowd sizes, calculated it at around 18,000. Saakashvili’s wife Sandra Roelofs was one of the leaders of the protest.
The protesters marched from Shevchenko Park to Maidan Nezalezhnosti, the site of the 2004 Orange Revolution and the 2014 EuroMaidan Revolution, and later to the Security Service of Ukraine’s detention facility on Askoldiv Lane, where Saakashvili is being held. Subsequently they marched to the Prosecutor General’s Office to demand Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko’s resignation.
On Dec. 9, the AutoMaidan car-based protest group also went to Lutsenko’s house to demand his resignation. The group said more than 300 cars took part – the largest AutoMaidan rally since the group went to ex-President Viktor Yanukovych’s estate in 2013.
Protesters demanded that the Verkhovna Rada pass laws setting presidential impeachment procedures, creating an anti-corruption court, stripping lawmakers of immunity of prosecutors and introducing a fairer electoral law during its last week this year from Dec. 18 through Dec. 22.
The demonstrators also protested against the authorities’ efforts to destroy the independent National Anti-Corruption Bureau, or NABU, earlier this week and against the dismissal of Yegor Soboliev, a critic of Poroshenko and defender of the NABU, as head of parliament’s anti-corruption committee on Dec. 7.
“My dismissal, the arrests and the assault on the NABU are signs of the hysteria of those who will soon be deprived of power,” Soboliev said at the rally. “It’s important that we don’t let Poroshenko, Lutsenko, (Deputy National Police Chief Vyacheslav) Abroskin and other organizers of repression flee. They must be jailed, and the property they stole must be confiscated.”
Lutsenko has accused Saakashvili, the leader of the recent protests, of getting funding from oligarch Serhiy Kurchenko, an ally of Yanukovych, to finance rallies against the authorities and plot a coup d’etat.
Saakashvili believes his arrest to be a political vendetta by Poroshenko and says a criminal case against him is being fabricated. His lawyer, Ruslan Chornolutsky, said that the former Georgian president had been arrested illegally without a court warrant.
“Like you, I’m not afraid of a scared president who has stolen the EuroMaidan’s victory and betrayed his people, turning from the guarantor of the Constitution into the guarantor of corruption,” Saakashvili said in a Dec. 9 statement that he passed through his lawyers. “I wasn’t afraid of (Russian dictator Vladimir) Putin, nor will I be afraid of this gang of petty thieves.”
A court is expected to consider placing Saakashvili under arrest or house arrest on Dec. 11, when another rally is planned.
The protest organizers say they are planning to hold demonstrations every Sunday until their demands are met.
