Zelensky sees his future

"President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine accused the government of Georgia on Wednesday of trying to kill its former president, Mikheil Saakashvili, who is now a Ukrainian citizen and imprisoned by the country he led in 2008.

“I think that today the Georgian government is killing him,” Mr. Zelensky said at a news conference in Kyiv, according to Ukrainian news media reports. “You know that they poisoned him and now, excuse me, they are killing him little by little.”

He suggested that Georgia, a former Soviet state, was mistreating Mr. Saakashvili, 55, a longtime nemesis of Russia, to curry favor with the Kremlin. Mr. Zelensky held up photos of the once robust former Georgian president, who has intermittently gone on hunger strikes to protest his treatment, looking gaunt.

Mr. Saakashvili’s allies, rights groups and foreign diplomats have accused Georgia of denying Mr. Saakashvili proper medical care since he returned to the country in 2021 and was arrested on charges of corruption and ordering the severe beating of a political opponent. Mr. Zelensky explicitly said that he was not commenting on the validity of the charges, only on what he called “public torture of a citizen of Ukraine.”

In 2003, Mr. Saakashvili helped lead street protests that chased President Eduard Shevardnadze, a former Soviet official, from office. Mr. Saakashvili then won a landslide election for the presidency at age 37. He was re-elected in 2008.

He set out to move Georgia out of Moscow’s orbit and closer to the West, seeking membership in NATO and the European Union — and infuriating President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. The two countries clashed repeatedly over the status of two regions of Georgia with Russian-backed separatist movements, Abkhazia and South Ossetia, and critics said Mr. Saakashvili was playing with fire by pushing hard to assert control over them.

In 2008, NATO promised membership, some day, to Georgia and Ukraine. A few months later, Russia invaded Georgia, defeating its forces within days, and it still has troops stationed in the breakaway regions.

To Ukrainians, whose country fought Russian-backed separatists for years, the parallels to Georgia’s experience are painfully obvious.

After Mr. Saakashvili left office in 2013, his political opponents took control and he left the country, living in Ukraine and the United States. He served for a time as the governor of the Odesa region of Ukraine and an adviser to Mr. Zelensky, and gained Ukrainian citizenship."