Mikheil Saakashvili, former President of Georgia: “Everything that Ukraine is going through today, we have experienced it”
Jam writing this letter from the medical cell of my Georgian prison, where I have been placed for several months due to the rapid deterioration of my physical condition. Independent Georgian doctors, brought together in a concilium by the Public Defender, and American, Swiss and British professionals are unanimous: the inhuman treatment that was inflicted on me, coupled with heavy metal poisoning, got the better of my health. I am therefore addressing you as long as my condition allows me to think and write, because my physical and mental condition is changing day by day.
I am imprisoned in the country of which I was the president and the craftsman of the rapprochement with the West. I am imprisoned by a regime which makes, through my captivity, an act of allegiance to Vladimir Putin. To Mr. Poutine who considered me, before the president [ukrainien Volodymyr] Zelensky does not dethrone me in this prestigious classification, as being his worst enemy in all the space of the former USSR. The Kremlin’s war of aggression against Ukraine has forced the Georgian regime to show its true face: it now clearly appears to want Putin’s victory and participates in circumventing European economic sanctions against Russia, according to the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen.
I am imprisoned following a sham trial whose decisions have been hailed internationally only by the dictatorial and imperialist regime of the Kremlin. All the reports from international organizations, Western diplomatic chancelleries, European Parliament resolutions, show that Georgia, under the rule of the oligarch Bidzina Ivanishvili, who got rich in Russia in the 1990s, is turning its back on the democracy and the rule of law, which, geopolitically, can only mean stopping the process of rapprochement with Europe and putting the country under Russian supervision. Moreover, ministers and propagandists for Mr Putin are full of praise for the Georgian government and its ” resistance “ to Western dictate. While the whole world regards the Putin regime as a pariah, the Georgia of oligarch Bidzina Ivanishvili claims to want to restore air links with Moscow.
When, in November 2003, my friends, the entire Georgian people and I carried out the “Rose Revolution”, the country was a failed state, corrupt to the core, whose main economic activity was to kidnap the few foreign investors who dared to venture there and demand a ransom. In less than nine years, we have been able to fight corruption and multiply the state budget by four. We have set the country on the road to European and Euro-Atlantic integration by negotiating the Association Agreement with the EU and by officially becoming a country aspiring to NATO membership.
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