Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky announced on Monday the expulsion of the Georgian ambassador in Kiev, in protest at the state of health of former Georgian leader Mikheil Saakashvili, also a Ukrainian citizen, who appeared weakened at his trial in Tbilisi.
“I asked the Foreign Ministry today to summon the Georgian ambassador, notify him of our protest and ask him to leave Ukraine within 48 hours for consultations in its capital,” Zelensky wrote on the Telegram platform.
Former Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili, detained since 2021, reappeared on Monday at the trial by videoconference and caused concern about the deterioration of his physical appearance.
“Georgia continues to slowly and cynically torture its former president Mikhail Saakashvili,” Ukrainian presidential adviser Mikhailo Podoliak wrote on Twitter.
According to Podoliak, Tbilisi is closing its prospects for European accession with this type of treatment towards Saakashvili, who appeared emaciated and pale on Monday.
“It’s an unbelievable historic suicide,” he said.
President between 2004 and 2013, Saakashvili is imprisoned in Georgia, accused of corruption and abuse of power. He was tried and convicted in absentia in 2018 and arrested in 2021 after returning from Ukraine, where he became governor of Odessa (south), to his country.
His health deteriorated due to repeated hunger strikes. In addition, the former president claims to have been poisoned.
Before entering prison, Saakashvili, who is 1.95m tall, weighed 116kg. In February of this year his weight was already 67 kilos and he has been falling ever since, according to the description of the Spanish news agency EFE.
At the same time, Zurab Chajidze, director of the Tifli clinic, where Saakashvili has been hospitalized since May 2022, said in June that the patient had begun to comply with some of the medical recommendations.
Zurab Chajidze said the former president could recover if he did not object to the deal he was offered.
At the end of May, the Georgian Justice reported that the European Court of Human Rights rejected the politician’s request to travel to Warsaw for treatment and did not impose an obligation on the authorities to transfer him to another medical center in Georgia.
Source: TSF
