To Avoid Handing Putin Another Victory, The West Must Save Saakashvili Now

One of the free world’s greatest allies in the post-Soviet era lies dying as a political prisoner in his home country, having been deliberately poisoned. The former President of Georgia, Mikheil Saakashvili was a stalwart friend of the US and Europe, steering his country unswervingly westward not least in loudly embracing democracy and free markets, making Georgia ranked as the best place to do business several times during his Presidency. He was a role model for the pro-democracy revolutions of the 2000s. He travelled the world banging the drum for open society values. He repeatedly identified Moscow under Putin as the fundamental enemy of post-Soviet independence, idealism, and enlightened world order. All that made him a prime target for the Kremlin’s ire, resulting in the 2008 Russian invasion which I covered as a journalist, interviewing him for the Wall Street Journal, and reporting on his tenure multiple times until he embraced exile in 2013 and since.

The urgent exigency before us is to secure his release and transfer to treatment abroad before it’s too late. At the very least for purely humanitarian reasons. But beyond that, Saakashvili embodies as an individual the equivalent of what Ukraine has come to symbolize: resistance to Putin’s sadism, resistance to Russian imperialism, affirmation of post-Soviet countries to be independent and live in safety, and to join the community of free nations. I explain below his importance for us and for the world. Above all for Western values to prevail. And why he must be saved from slow assassination. It’s imperative to put pressure on the authorities in Tbilisi immediately, and to amplify the campaign to save him.

In November, the European Parliament passed resolutions reiterating calls on the Georgian authorities to release Saakashvili and allow him to undergo proper medical treatment abroad on humanitarian grounds and as a means of reducing political polarization. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has also called for Saakashvili to be set free, offering him a place in a Ukrainian clinic and saying his continued detention by the Georgian authorities is an act of cruelty. A team of U.S. medical experts examined Saakashvili last fall and prepared medical reports detailing the torture and poisoning Saakashvili has endured in detention and submitted these reports to a Georgian court in an effort to get his sentence deferred so he can receive life-saving medical treatment in the United States or Europe.

During Saakashvili’s tenure (2004 – 2013), after which he left Georgia, Moscow never ceased destabilizing actions up to and including KGB-scripted interference in the October 2012 national election which he lost to Russian-funded oligarch Bidzina Ivanishvili. Georgia has never recovered, leaving its promise of fully joining the free-world nations unfulfilled, slowly falling into the Moscow-induced sleeping sickness of stability in exchange for political inertia. For those who argued that Saakashvili took short-cuts with the law and tilted democratic processes in his favor while in power, especially his Western critics, there’s no greater riposte needed: he lost, he left, while his rival still controls the country through political proxies and limitless funds via Russia.

Saakashvili warned that Putin would move on to similar conduct against Ukraine if the West didn’t respond severely to the brutalization and pacification of Georgia. We didn’t. In fact, he was treated as a gratuitous provocateur by Western elites, a threat to vested interests doing business with Moscow, from Big Oil to big investment banks. Yet, as we can now see starkly, he was right. He was so respected for his achievements in Georgia, for transparency, for cleaning up the judiciary, for transforming the economy, establishing independent media and much else – all erased by his successors – that both he and various officials of his team later got posts in Ukraine and elsewhere. They met with mixed success. Nevertheless, he became a Ukrainian citizen, a country he loved, where he had gone to college. Most recently he was appointed as an advisor to President Zelensky in 2020.

Throughout his exile, he remained a prominent public figure. No wonder that his political rivals in Georgia tried him in absentia of trumped up charges under what was by then a politically servile judiciary. He was accused essentially of complicity in two separate cases, of murder and of physical assault. He was convicted years after the incidents only when he had moved abroad and the court procedures could be safely rigged. No independent observer can doubt the political usurpation of the judicial rules, and the reasons for doing so – namely to keep Saakashvili from returning as a viable challenger to the regime in Tbilisi. And thereby, again, to become any sort of threat to Vladimir Putin. Because the eminence grise ruling Georgia from the shadows, Bidzina Ivanishvili, had made a tacit faustian pact to keep the country politically muted, neither embodying the noisiness of open democracy for all Russo-sphere countries to emulate, nor a geo-strategic disrupter of Moscow’s hold on the Caucasus.

After eight years of watching from afar the neutering of democratic institutions Saakashvili couldn’t stand off any longer. He slipped back into Georgia hoping to reignite the kind of people-power momentum that had worked so often before. He was quickly arrested before his presence could make a change. In short order, the authorities violated his legal and certainly his human rights, imposing isolation, denying hearings, legal representation and much else. He went on hunger strike for 50 days. Throughout his ordeal of imprisonment from October 2021 to the present, he has been severely mistreated, beaten up, isolated, humiliated, psychologically and physically tortured, denied the right medications, given the wrong ones, poisoned – the list is endless. His health has deteriorated radically to the point where he will certainly die if he doesn’t get immediate treatment outside the country. There can be no doubt that he was poisoned, as has been independently determined by world-renowned toxicology experts who were able to visit him and take samples in October 2022. More about the details of that later.

First, let us examine the context to understand why his enemies want to kill him now more than ever and why allowing that would be a historic tragedy, a huge setback for the West, at a time when Moscow, reeling in Ukraine, needs to make an example of its dominion over former colonies. Western authorities have repeatedly shied from challenging Putin’s forensic and symbolic victories at crucial junctures: mini-invasions, assassinations, poisonings, support for authoritarians and black hole regions, support for oligarchic corruption abroad – all of which we ignored and we now see the full-scale real-world results in Ukraine. The predicament of Georgia’s ex-President offers the West a decisive individual test case we cannot afford to shy from this time. It’s no exaggeration to say that ceding Putin this victory will embolden him elsewhere, not excluding Ukraine. Putin will believe that the West’s apathy is ever dependable and will dig in for the long game – if we let his proxies quietly murder one of his most internationally recognized critics.

The (partial) apathy of Georgians themselves furnishes an object lesson in the long-term accretional effect of largely government-controlled media and other supposedly independent institutions on a population. Saakashvili’s reputation has been systematically and successfully blackened by a drizzle of horrifically extreme accusations over time, the kind of stuff that reeks of KGB dark-ops. During the 2012 campaign, appalling videos showing unpleasant sadistic scenes in prison were leaked to the opposition media, deeds somehow blamed on the Saakashvili government. The videos were the work of Moscow-friendly Georgian mafias. A child was found dead in a wine vat at a random low-level opposition sympathizer’s house on the eve of the election. The parents accused the government of murder, an accusation later retracted by the mother.

In the first of Saakashvili’s trials in absentia, four interior ministry officials were convicted of causing the death of a bank employee in 2004. Two years later, they were pardoned by Saakashvili. In 2018, he was convicted in absentia for those pardons in a parody of a trial where witnesses to the incident were barred from testifying, among other travesties. The other trial pertained to a 2005 incident where a businessman got beaten up by four anonymous thugs. Nearly 10 years later, in 2014, the public prosecutor charged Saakashvili with organizing the attack. Hearsay testimony from two top politicians, allies-turned-fierce opponents of the former President, played a prominent part in the proceedings. Higher courts rejected all appeals by Saakashvili’s lawyers despite glaring irregularities.

Such shocking headline-making smears, on the scale of famous Goebbels ‘Big Lie’ theory, have an effect over time. Many Georgians began to associate the Saakashvili years with dark doings, notwithstanding the empirical reality that the country had risen from failed-state conditions to its highest ever achievements, despite Russian trade embargoes, separatist provocations, propaganda bombardments and an invasion. Equally the Ivanishvili information machine gradually blamed the ex-President for the invasion itself, as if absolving Putin of moral responsibility. On one occasion, the transcript of a Saakashvili phone-call from abroad during an election was leaked exhorting his party to confront the authorities’ repressive maneuvers head-on. Only it was a distorted, falsified transcript, apparently inciting people to terrorist acts and killings. A kind of ‘mad dog’ murderous depraved image of Saakashvili supplanted the reality in the minds of many Georgians. They could believe that such a figure had forced Putin’s hand, even deliberately in order to get the country patriotically aligned behind him against Moscow.

If the above propaganda process sounds familiar, that’s because it is. It was invented in Russia. We have witnessed exactly such a sustained campaign over the years by the Kremlin to pacify its own population by incessantly spreading conspiracy theories and dark scenarios through multiple television channels. A population so utterly conflicted and confused depends with relief on an authoritarian anti-democratic strongman to guide the country, and disbelieves the veracity of any news that might destabilize things. Applied to Georgia, it has had the effect of keeping Ivanishvili unchallenged in shadowy power behind the scenes for ten years. This despite his palpable passivity towards Russia which still occupies a fifth of his country, despite a manifestly fake posture of embracing the EU and western alignment. And despite a conspicuously hostile position towards Ukraine’s fight against Russia – not allowing Zelensky to address parliament, outlawing Georgians who volunteer to defend Ukraine. All very unpopular policies.

In this swirling morass of a deliberately corrupted national psychology, it’s hard for a population to believe in a genuinely idealistic, transparent, uncynical democratic environment, let alone the motivations of a figure like Saakashvili who invokes it. And so, many Georgians don’t. He’s an egomaniac in pursuit of power. His hunger strike adds up to nothing more than drama-mongering. He hasn’t really been poisoned, isn’t really dying. Which is why it’s so crucial to insist on the empirical indisputable facts about his condition.

A team of five independent U.S. medical doctors who examined Saakashvili several weeks ago determined that he suffers from a range of serious illnesses which require advanced medical treatment in a modern facility in the United States or Western Europe. Prior to being detained just over a year ago, Saakashvili was an energetic healthy man in his early 50s; he now suffers from debilitating psychological, neurological, orthopedic and gastrointestinal conditions which threaten his life. He has lost over 40 kilograms, suffered seizures, displays serious neurocognitive impairment and desperately requires immediate orthopedic surgery as a result of beatings sustained by prison guards. He is kept on a regimen of over a dozen drugs, some of which exacerbate his medical conditions, and some of which are not considered safe by global health standards. There is evidence that he has been poisoned and prescribed an improper drug regimen that has led to white matter reduction in his brain. There is consensus among the U.S. medical doctors and a separate group of almost a dozen European doctors who have recently examined Saakashvili that he needs immediate medical care in an advanced medical treatment center abroad in order to save his life.

As the representatives of the Council of Europe noted this summer, Mr. Saakashvili’s death would have dire consequences for the stability of civil society in Georgia and potentially devastating effects on its future. United States officials should be urged to exert maximum pressure on the Georgian government to release Saakashvili on humanitarian grounds and in order to avoid unnecessarily extinguishing a light of democratic ideals that has stood steadfast in the face of Putin’s imperialism.