Former Georgian President and former head of the Odessa Regional State Administration Mikheil Saakashvili published an open letter to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. In his appeal, he asked to be included in the list of civilian prisoners, emphasizing that his persecution in Georgia is directly related to Russia’s war against Ukraine.
Mikheil Saakashvili wrote about this on Facebook.
Saakashvili reported that he had been transferred from the prison hospital, where he was being treated for severe poisoning, back to prison — to the staff who, according to him, were involved in the poisoning. The politician recalled that the fact of poisoning in 2022 was confirmed by American and German laboratories.
He noted that a new criminal case had been opened against him, which included statements by Volodymyr Zelenskyy and presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak.
“In the new criminal case recently brought against me, I and others are accused of sabotage in favor of a hostile foreign state. The case materials contain your statements, as well as statements by Mykhailo Podolyak. In other words, the illegal Georgian authorities are directly declaring Ukraine an enemy foreign state. And this is not surprising, because from the very beginning of this great war, Russian oligarch Ivanishvili and his servants openly sided with Russia,” the letter says.
In the letter, he thanked the president for his support and recalled that in 2019, Zelenskyy restored his Ukrainian citizenship.
“My persecution and my fate are linked to the war. I am a citizen of Ukraine and the head of the Executive Committee of the National Reform Council, where I had the honor of working under your leadership. I would like to ask you, as you did in 2019 when you restored my illegally revoked citizenship, to please include me, as the former head of the Odesa Regional State Administration and the head of the Executive Committee of the National Reform Council, who is being illegally detained by the pro-Russian regime in Georgia, in the list of civilian prisoners of this war with the corresponding legal consequences,” Saakashvili wrote.
He stressed that “Ukrainians do not abandon their own,” so he is counting on Zelenskyy.