Saakashvili stripped of Ukrainian citizenship
Ihor Mosiychuk, a Verkhovna Rada deputy from the Oleh Lyashko Radical Party, said that President Petro Poroshenko has revoked the Ukrainian citizenship of Mikheil Saakashvili, former head of the Odessa province’s state administration. Ihor Mosiychuk posted about this on his Facebook page.
“It has been confirmed to me: it’s true – the Georgian ‘Yanukovych’ has been deprived of Ukrainian citizenship, and this is evidence that President Petro Poroshenko has finally started to acknowledge his own mistakes,” Mosiychuk wrote.
The TSN news program later received confirmation of this information from the State Migration Service of Ukraine.
Saakashvili’s citizenship is forfeited on the basis of item 2 sec. 19 of the law “On citizenship”, and more specifically, on the basis of false information provided in forms. In the documents which the former governor of the Odessa province filled in, it was specified that he was not under investigation inside or outside of Ukraine, but in Georgia Saakashvili was tried in absentia.
The migration service noted that Andrei Lozovoy sent a request to the Prosecutor General’s Office of Ukraine (GPU) regarding Saakashvili’s citizenship, and the GPU contacted the migration service. The commission on matters of citizenship then made the relevant decision.
The information has also been officially confirmed on the website of the state migration service.
Former Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili acquired a Ukrainian passport at the end of May 2015 so that he could be appointed governor of the Odessa province in Ukraine. According to the Georgian constitution, a Georgian citizen cannot have the passport of another state, and acquiring foreign citizenship is grounds for loss of Georgian citizenship.
For this reason, in October 2015 the Georgian Ministry of Justice began the procedure of revoking Saakashvili’s citizenship.
However, Saakashvili’s career as governor of the Odessa province did not work out, and in 2016 he resigned and left in sharp opposition to President Petro Poroshenko.
On the 22nd of June 2017 at a briefing in Brussels, President Petro Poroshenko said that he does not know what Saakashvili is doing in Ukraine. Anton Herashchenko, one of the spokespersons for “People’s Front” said that Saakashvili was “politically bankrupt” and “trying to please the Ukrainians”.
On July 12, First Deputy Chairperson of Georgian Parliament Tamar Chugoshvili said that the Ukrainian delegation of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe had asked their Georgian colleagues to restore former president Mikheil Saakashvili’s Georgian citizenship so that his Ukrainian citizenship could be revoked.