David Sakvarelidze, former deputy prosecutor general of Ukraine and an associate of Movement of New Forces leader Mikheil Saakashvili, said he has no intention of leaving the territory of Ukraine.
“I am not going to leave the territory of Ukraine,” Sakvarelidze said at a press conference in Lviv on March 13.
A preliminary hearing will be held in the Mostysky District Court of Lviv region on March 14 in connection with the accusations made against him by prosecutors, he said.
Valeria Kolomiyets, a lawyer for Sakvarelidze, said her client is charged with four crimes.
“First, Sakvarelidze is charged with plotting with other persons to paralyze the work of the Shehyni checkpoint on September 10, 2017, although the checkpoint was already not working when the bus carrying Saakashvili came to the Ukrainian border,” she said.
Kolomiyets also said Sakvarelidze was initially accused of illegally moving some Ukrainian and foreign journalists over the Ukrainian border. “However, these accusations disappeared from the case materials during the trial, and he is now charged with moving Saakashvili over the Polish and Ukrainian border. But it does not say how precisely he did so, if he carried them in the trunk of a car, threw them over the border, or carried them over the border,” Kolomiyets said.
Sakvarelidze is also charged with resisting and harming a State Border Guard Service official, she said.
As reported, in July 2017, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko stripped Saakashvili of his Ukrainian citizenship while the latter was in the United States. In September, Saakashvili, surrounded by his supporters, crossed from Poland into Ukraine, breaking across the border.
On February 12, Saakashvili was detained in Kyiv and sent back to Poland.
It was subsequently reported that Saakashvili had arrived in the Netherlands, where his family resides, from Warsaw.
