Imagine a guest you had invited into your home after a short while began to publicly attack you (his host), make radical demands for the re-organization of your home and, after taking money from domestic and possibly hostile neighbors, paid pickets to set up tents outside your front door. He then went on a foreign holiday and you decided not to let him back in but he then with the force of his paid protestors forcibly crossed into your home pushing aside private security guards.
Would you consider that he had abused his stay? Would you most probably insist in strong language that he forever vacate your premises?
Such thoughts are in the uppermost minds of Ukrainians. One cannot imagine the Poles, British, Americans, French or others looking nonchalantly at the antics of a person they had given political asylum to who then attempted to organize a revolution against them, putting up tents in front of their parliaments and paralyzing major thoroughfares through their cities.
It is inconceivable the British and Americans, for example, would permit a protest tent city to be encamped outside parliament and congress or permit Whitehall and Pennsylvania Avenue to be paralyzed for months on end. A protest tent city filled with radicals who sporadically attempted to storm parliament and congress would be viewed as a potential security threat by MI5 and the secret service and FBI. One can only imagine the level of force US customs and border protection officers would have used against an illegal crossing into the US that attempted to push aside law enforcement officers.
Opinion polls showed that Ukrainians have similar thoughts to what European and Americans would have had. Ukrainians never warmed to the idea of a foreigner seeking to create a revolution. Irrespective of his Ukrainian citizenship Mikheil Saakashvilli was always viewed as a Georgian. His Movement of New Forces, registered by the Ministry of Justice in February 2017, never received more than 2% support. Even if his Ukrainian citizenship had been restored, Saakashvilli could not have stood for parliamentary election or as a presidential candidate as he had not lived in Ukraine for the legally proscribed time prior to the 2019 elections.
A second reason why Ukrainians did not warm to Saakshvilli was because his antics were at a time when Russia is at war with Ukraine. This has cost over 20, 000 lives, or 10, 000 civilian and 10, 000 military casualties (of which 3,000 are Ukrainian). This year the Ukrainian government is spending 6% of GDP on defense – a figure higher than any of NATO’s 29 members. To put it simply, very few Ukrainians believe this is the right time to have a third Maidan which would only play into Russian President Vladimir Putin’s hands.
A third factor was that Saakashvilli is a hypocrite with no legs to stand on. In October 2011, when he was Georgian President, Saakashvilli stripped Bidzina Ivanishvili of his citizenship just after he had called for Misha’s overthrow (http://dfwatch.net/billionaires-citizenship-was-unlawfully-revoked-lawyer-says-92258-742). Coming at a time when his regime was becoming increasingly authoritarian, Saakashvilli has no moral high ground to stand on.
Saakashvilli never understood the views of Ukrainians because his fiery Georgian populism turned his dismissal as Odesa governor into a personal crusade against President Petro Poroshenko. This was wrong for two reasons.
Firstly, Saakashvilli should act like the European he claims to be and take responsibility for his poor performance in Odesa where his loud rhetoric and PR hype was never matched by concrete performance and fulfilled objectives. His time in Odesa proved what is true of all populists, whether during Yulia Tymoshenko’s and Party of Regions governments or abroad, that populist politicians are really bad at government.
Secondly, many commentators about Ukrainian politics forget that Ukraine is a parliamentary system where the executive is divided between the government and president. President Poroshenko therefore shares responsibility for reforms and fighting corruption with two other branches – parliament and government. It was therefore wrong for Saakshvilli to focus all his criticism against Poroshenko when blame should be apportioned.
Throwing around accusations of responsibility, as Saakshvilli and other populists such as Tymoshenko and Radical Party leader Oleh Lyashko routinely do, is irresponsible because it seeks to mask the actions of their own chameleon parliamentary deputies and factions.
This is particularly the case with Saakashvilli’s biggest supporter, Tymoshenko, who regularly rose to his defense and went to meet him in Lviv after he had illegally crossed the border. In studying the voting preferences of deputies on reform legislation, Vox Ukraine found that half of Tymosenko’s faction vote regularly with the ruling coalition and half with the odious pro-Russian Opposition Bloc. And yet in Washington just last week, Tymoshenko presented herself as an ally of the US and supporter of reforms in Ukraine.
Vox Ukraine rated Tymoshenko’s support for fighting corruption at just over half (56%), decentralization (one of the most successful reforms since 2014) at only 20%, banking reforms at 39%, business regulations 37% and energy independence at a paltry 10% (https://voxukraine.org/ipr/index.html?filter=but). Batkivshchina are opposed to land privatization (https://www.tymoshenko.ua/en/news-en/we-are-against-the-government-s-proposed-pension-medical-and-land-reforms-because-they-will-destroy-ukrainians/).
Populists like to beat their chests about their patriotism but Tymoshenko missed the January 18 parliamentary vote on the new law on the Donbas.
Saakashvilli’s deportation from Ukraine was the best of three options.
These could have been criminally charging him based on allegations he had taken money to organize protests from one of Viktor Yanukovych’s odious kleptocrats Sergei Kurchenko who is in exile in Russia, deport him to Georgia where trumped-up charges awaited him in a country where Ivanshili is in power who he had attempted to strip of his citizenship or the third option of deportation to Poland from where he illegally crossed into Ukraine. The Ukrainian authorities chose the best of the three, deportation into EU member Poland.
Taras Kuzio is a non-resident fellow at the Center for Transatlantic Relations, Johns Hopkins-SAIS and the author of Putin’s War Against Ukraine and joint author of The Sources of Russia’s Great Power Politics: Ukraine and the Challenge to the European Order.
