Energy vampire by the name of Saakashvili
Twenty-four hours have not passed since the breakthrough of the Ukrainian border by Mr. Saakashvili when public and media interest in everything connected with this event started to drop very fast. The number of respective headlines in the newswires of Internet resources and news broadcasts on television has dropped significantly. The stories "about Saakashvili" moved from the first place to second, third and fourth. Verbal battles of his supporters and opponents in social networks stopped in a couple of hours.
What happened? The point here is not that someone deliberately gave the instruction not to publish or mention anything. It's about the nature of this person. Mikheil Saakashvili is traditionally active just for a short period of time, and then he quickly starts to "catch his breath."
Remember those two-and-a-half years - the "Ukrainian period" of Saakashvili. The ex-Georgian president became the ex-chairman of the Odesa regional administration. It was in such a sequence. In this blatantly vivid discrepancy lie the main reasons for the Ukrainian failure of Saakashvili and the headache that he inflicts on Ukraine today.
The beginning of his governorship in Odesa was the "ninth wave" of initiatives, crowded forums, high-profile personnel decisions and public accusations of abuse and corruption. Then, in a matter of weeks, everything goes down – the initiatives must be persistently promoted, social activity organized, and accusations proved, collecting evidence and facts for a long time. The governor cannot and does not want to do all this. The rest of the time on the Odesa "throne" - and these are months - Saakashvili always complains, but in truth, he is frankly bored – that's not his level.
And then there is a new opportunity to be in the spotlight - anti-corruption forums, which the then head of Odesa Regional State Administration decided to hold across the country. The first such forum was held in Kyiv in the beginning of winter 2015. Expectations are overwhelming, and thousands of people from the Maidan, waiting for rapid changes, filled the halls of the Exhibition Center near the Livoberezhna metro station. Inflammatory speeches, brainstorming, presentations. A speech by the leader. Saakashvili gets an ovation, but people who know something in the public sphere can clearly see how he gets himself going technologically, as if fueled by energy from the crowd. Well, let it be so - they calm themselves - this is just the beginning, let's see what happens in the regions. And in the regions the wave of rosy expectations drops almost to zero, and words remain just words. In Kharkiv and Dnipro there was significantly lower energy, and it was noticeable, almost physically, that it was not interesting to Mikheil.
Then a party with the weird name "Movement of New Forces." Who advised him such a name is a mystery. But the start again with the simulation of an explosion - powerfully advertised meetings with the leaders of the political forces that are opposed to the current government, attempts to deploy a network of headquarters. But very quickly this turbulent flow is reduced to a petty fuss with registration: "The Movement of New Forces" or "The Movement of New Forces of Mikheil Saakashvili"... However, it is already noticeable that Saakashvili himself does not have "new forces" and even "old" forces so that he could pretend to be interested in his party brainchild.
And then, as a gift of fate, we see the story with the deprivation of his citizenship. Who proposed the idea of galvanizing a political corpse with a rating of 1-1.5%, which was steadily going to zero? This question has already been raised, but we did not hear the answers to it. And it's a pity. The country of the two Maidans has the right to know its "heroes," who at least are not able to see beyond the end of their nose. But what's interesting – conduct a social survey now - at best, this one-and-a-half percent will temporarily double, to a chanceless three. And this is after such a loud scandal with the breakthrough of the border at Shehyni... Mikheil is exhaust steam, and this should be understood by those who fear him and those who may still have pink illusions about him.
However, there are no fools among Ukrainian politicians who, along with Saakashvili, were fussing on Sunday along the Polish-Ukrainian border. All of them see perfectly well that the former Georgian president has no political future either in Ukraine or elsewhere. And they did this – a meeting of the "headquarters in a Hyundai," a briefing on the train platform in Przemysl, a march to Krakovets and a "strategic" turn to Shehyni - just to score some points, just in case, if the trouble comes tomorrow. The fact that the by-product of this show was the humiliation of the state of Ukraine worries them the least. It will now be very interesting to watch how these "political animals," individuals protected by parliamentary immunity, respond to absolutely legitimate and predictable actions of the authorities that have already begun: detentions, suspicions, measures of restraint against those who helped them "break through" the state border.
Not forgetting the still incomprehensible slap with the deprivation of Saakashvili's Ukrainian citizenship, it should be noted that the tactics chosen by the authorities after the "Shehyni breakthrough" - the immersion of this shameful scandal, along with all its participants, into a boring bureaucratic procedure - is the only right thing today. Investigations, accusations by prosecutors, lawyers' responses, court trials, recusal, appeals, etc. - all this reduced to zero not just such a shame. And what else, in such a situation, can you strive for?
And finally – more about Saakashvili. Yes, 50 years for a top-ranking politician is just the beginning, but for Saakashvili it turned out to be the final. He can exist as a player in the political theater, only in the leading role, on the top of a pyramid, the superintendent of all, a "monarch." However, no one will give him his kingdom any longer. And Mikheil does not want and cannot accept it, and all this would be a great theme for a tragic play (where are you, Shakespeares of the present?), but even a comedy does not come out of it. At least for Ukrainians. After all, it is our energy that this energy vampire "drinks," the energy that we definitely need to spend on something else.
Ihor Petruk, Kyiv
