The ex-leader of Georgia, political prisoner Mikheil Saakashvili, said that Russian President Vladimir Putin considered him and the murdered Russian opposition leader Oleksiy Navalny equally dangerous until 2022.
“We both fell into his (Putin’s) clutches,” Saakashvili writes in his Ukrainska Pravda column.
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The Georgian leader admits that he was not a fan of Navalny after his support for Russia’s war against Georgia in 2008 and the annexation of the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea in 2014.
However last year, the well-known opposition leader apologized for his rhetoric about Georgia and called for Saakashvili’s release.
“I know that many Ukrainians and Georgians still haven’t forgiven him, but I still believe that in his situation expressing such changes in position requires additional courage,” the Georgian president believes.
“At one time, Putin considered me his main enemy in the post-Soviet space (of course, now Volodymyr Zelensky is confidently leading in this category), and Navalny – inside Russia,” he claims.
After the death of Navalny, Saakashvili remains the only person whom the Russian president promised to kill, but he is still alive.
He recalled that Putin personally promised former French President Nicolas Sarkozy “to hang me by the balls in 2008.”
“That is why Ukraine, France, Poland, Lithuania, and the European Parliament demand my release. This is also demanded by the majority of the Georgian people, but so far all this has been broken by the resistance of the Russian-Georgian oligarch Ivanishvili, who is completely connected to Moscow,” said Saakashvili, while mentioning that the Georgian government, and especially the security forces, are under the control of the Russian special services.
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Saakashvili believes that his salvation depends on the success of the Armed Forces of Ukraine.
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