Saakashvili in conversation with Bild: Ivanishvili hands over Georgia to Putin

Former Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, who is serving a six-year prison sentence in his native country for abuse of power, gave an interview to a German Bild edition. He said, among other things, that he was “absolutely confident” in Russian President Vladimir Putin’s decisive role in his criminal prosecution.

According to Saakashvili, he is convinced that his party, the United National Movement (UNM), lost the October 2012 parliamentary elections and lost power as a result of a large-scale Russian special operation. “They gave Ivanishvili (Bidzina Ivanishvili, billionaire, founder of the ruling Georgian Dream party) two billion dollars to run the election campaign,” the former president said, referring to the fact that during this election campaign, the billionaire Georgian was able to sell all his assets in Russia.

“Ivanishvili hands Georgia to Putin and doesn’t want me to go back to Ukraine to help Zelenskyyy,” said the ex-president. Saakashvili called the current Ukrainian president “a modern Churchill”.

Georgian authorities have yet to react to Saakashvili’s accusations. There were also no official comments from Moscow.

Speaking in an interview about his state of health, Mikheil Saakashvili noted that after his arrest on October 1, 2021, he lost weight from 120 to 67 kilograms. In addition, the politician claims that during his forced transfer to Gldani prison, he suffered brain damage.

Mikheil Saakashvili, who was Georgia’s president from 2004 to 2013, was sentenced by the Tbilisi City Court to six years in prison for organizing the beating of opposition MP and businessman Valery Gelashvili by Department of the Interior Special Forces in 2005, who insulted his wife, Georgia’s first lady, in an interview with Sandra Ruloffs. Saakashvili has never pleaded guilty in this or four other criminal cases brought against him since 2015. Since May last year, the ex-president has been undergoing treatment for a number of endocrine and mental illnesses at the clinic private Vivamedi in Tbilisi, where he was assigned to a two-room service with 24-hour security.