Mikhail Saakashvili He was arrested in October 2021 when he returned to Georgia to support his party, the United National Movement. Charges against him related to abuse of office and ordering violence against protesters in 2007, but since the end of his presidency, Georgian politics has continued to revolve around his figure, who appears to have been increasingly ill in recent weeks. Saakashvili said he was repeatedly beaten and poisoned in prison. An American lawyer visited him, saw his analysis report and confirmed traces of mercury and arsenic in his nails and hair, indicating heavy metal poisoning in the politician. The lawyer also spoke of signs of violence on his body, bruises and cuts and described a frightened and tired man. Saakashvili’s story is that of an effusive pro-European who took over a country plagued by corruption, dreamed of modernizing it and implemented its reforms with questionable methods. He managed to be re-elected a second time, and in his second term he faced a war against overbearing neighbor Russia. In 2008, Vladimir Putin was already in the Kremlin, very upset by these pro-Western aspirations of Saakashvili, who asked for EU and NATO membership, invited foreign leaders and not him, and promised to solve the problem of the two breakaway republics of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, which were and are Russia’s levers of influence in Georgia. To stop this theatrical but non-acting president, Russia invaded Georgia and declared that it was moving in defense of the two regions that had been subjected to Georgian violence.
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