Saakashvili to pay a 130 dollar fine for illegally crossing Ukrainian border

Mikheil Saakashvili, the former president of Georgia who is now the leader of the opposition New Forces Movement in Ukraine, is liable to pay a fine of 3 400 hryvnias (USD 130) and a court fee of 320 hryvnias (about 12 dollars) as penalty for trespassing the state border, according to a ruling made by the district court of Ukraine’s Lvov Oblast.

Ukraine’s Hromadske TV reported that Saakashvili was not in the courtroom to hear the verdict as he was meeting his supporters in the Cherkassy Oblast at the time.

On 26 July, the president of Ukraine, Petro Poroshenko, signed a decree stripping Saakashvili of his Ukrainian citizenship. The reason cited for the decision was Saakashvili failing to mention in his citizenship application that he was under investigation in Georgia.

Saakashvili, who was in the USA at the time the decree came through, said it was politically motivated. Ukraine’s was the only citizenship Saakashvili had, which meant the decree made him a stateless person. However, even with his passport cancelled, he managed to travel from the USA to Poland and then elsewhere in Europe.

On 10 September, following a series of unsuccessful attempts, Saakashvili finally crossed the Poland-Ukraine border, as a crowd of supporters literally carried him over into Ukraine, breaking through a cordon of law-enforcers in the process. The former Georgian president himself, along with his supporters, said that it was the Ukrainian authorities, not him, who are guilty of obstructing his attempts to pass the border crossing control formalities prohibiting him from lodging a complaint with the court against the revocation of his citizenship.

According to the Ukrainian interior ministry, 11 policemen and 5 border guards were injured in the melee on the border between Poland and Ukraine. Later, it became known that the police had arrested five people who’d come to the border to support Saakashvili.