TBILISI, Georgia (AP) – Georgia’s Foreign Ministry criticized Ukraine on Tuesday for urging the Georgian ambassador to return to Tbilisi for consultations over the poor well being of imprisoned former president Mikheil Saakashvili, who can also be a Ukrainian citizen.
The Foreign Ministry known as Ukraine’s motion “an extreme form of escalation.”
Ukraine’s Foreign Ministry had summoned Georgian Ambassador George Zakarashvili to specific its protest over the obvious important deterioration within the well being of Saakashvili, who was convicted of abuse of energy whereas he was president in 2004-2013.
“The decision of the Ukrainian authorities causes serious damage to the strategic relations between the two countries and represents a direct interference in the internal affairs of a sovereign state,” Georgia’s Foreign Ministry mentioned in its assertion.
Saakashvili appeared severely emaciated Monday throughout a videolink testimony to a courtroom contemplating a brand new abuse-of-power case in opposition to him.
Saakashvili and his supporters declare that he has been poisoned whereas imprisoned and that he now weighs about 60 kilograms (132 kilos), half of what he weighed when he was arrested in October 2021.
Speaking from a non-public clinic the place he’s being held, he advised the courtroom that regardless of his poor well being, he’s “spiritually fit and determined to serve the country,” based on native information web site Agenda.
Saakashvili, who turned Georgia’s president after main the Rose Revolution protests that drove the earlier president out of workplace, left for Ukraine after the tip of his second time period. He was later convicted in absentia of abuse of energy and sentenced to 6 years in jail.
He was arrested in October 2021 after returning to Georgia to attempt to bolster opposition forces earlier than nationwide municipal elections. He is now on trial on expenses related to the violent dispersal of an opposition rally in 2007.
Saakashvili holds Ukrainian citizenship and was governor of that nation’s Odesa area in 2015-16. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Monday known as on Georgia to ship Saakashvili to Ukraine for medical therapy.
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