THEY were just students when they first met. Petro Poroshenko and Mikheil Saakashvili were two ambitious undergraduates at Kiev’s Taras Shevchenko University in the late 1980s. Mr Saakashvili went on to become president of Georgia in 2004, where he pursued an aggressive agenda of reforms before his party lost power in 2012. Mr Poroshenko became the wealthy owner of a huge confectionery company, and won Ukraine’s presidency following the Maidan revolution in 2014. For help turning his country around, he turned to his old schoolmate, inviting Mr Saakashvili in May 2015 to head the vital region of Odessa. Mr Poroshenko granted him Ukrainian citizenship and declared him “a great friend of Ukraine”.
It took little more than a year for the old friends to become bitter foes. In November 2016 Mr Saakashvili resigned and went into opposition. On July 26th the authorities announced that Mr Saakashvili’s Ukrainian citizenship had been annulled. Since Georgia’s...Continue reading
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