I warned West about Putin long ago: former Georgian president

Imprisoned former Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili says Vladimir Putin warned him about his plans to invade Ukraine during their ‘first meeting’ in 2004.

Georgia's former president Mikheil Saakashvili speaking from the defendant's box during his trial for his alleged role in a violent police crackdown on an opposition protest in 2007.

Vladimir Putin outlined his intention to seize Ukraine almost two decades ago but warnings about his aggressive territorial ambitions were disregarded by the West, the imprisoned former president of Georgia has claimed in a letter to The Times.

Mikheil Saakashvili said Mr Putin made no secret about his plans for land grabs when they met for talks at the Kremlin in 2004. “Everything that he is doing now, he more or less made clear to me at our very first meeting,” Saakashvili, 55, wrote in a letter that was smuggled out of the prison hospital where he is being held in Tbilisi, Georgia’s capital.

His remarks come 15 years after Russia invaded Georgia in 2008; a conflict that is widely seen as a smaller-scale precursor to the assault on Ukraine. Mr Putin’s tanks came within 32km of ­Tbilisi before a French-brokered ceasefire halted the five-day war – but left Russia in control of one fifth of Georgia’s territory.

Saakashvili said that he travelled to Berlin to express his concerns about Mr Putin after the Kremlin meeting in 2004, but German chancellor Gerhard Schroder was unmoved. “Unsurprisingly, he immediately denounced me to Putin,” he wrote.

Russian President Vladimir Putin attends a meeting on Crimean Bridge attack via video link at the Kremlin in Moscow on July 17.

Mr Schroder has faced criticism over his links to Russian ­energy companies and his refusal to criticise Mr Putin over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Saakashvili was president of Georgia, a mountainous former Soviet republic on the coast of the Black Sea that borders Russia and Turkey, from 2004 to 2013. He came to power after the Rose Revolution and introduced sweeping reforms to stamp out corruption and put the country on the road to membership of the EU and NATO. He also oversaw the ­destruction of Soviet-era symbols and monuments.

However, his rule was seen as increasingly heavy-handed, and he lost power after video emerged of torture in Georgian prisons.

He is serving a six-year prison term on abuse-of-power charges that he and his allies say were politically motivated.

Russia sent troops into Georgia after Saakashvili ordered Georgian troops to attack South Ossetia, a Moscow-backed province that was controlled by separatists. Before the conflict Russia had handed out passports to South Ossetians, a tactic that the Kremlin has also used in eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region to justify military action.

Saakashvili continued to issue warnings about Mr Putin after the 2008 war but the comments were routinely dismissed. “When I warned the West about Putin, I was disregarded as a volatile, embittered lunatic,” he wrote.

Saakashvili during a video link from prison earlier this year.

Critics have accused Western countries of ignoring Mr Putin’s expansionist tendencies in their eagerness to return to business as usual with energy-rich Russia after the war in Georgia.

After losing power in Georgia, Saakashvili moved to Ukraine, where he was granted citizenship and briefly served as the governor of Odesa. In 2015 he was the most popular politician in Ukraine, according to one opinion poll, but he fell out with Petro Poroshenko, president at the time, who stripped him of his citizenship. It was restored by President Volodymyr Zelensky in 2019.

He was arrested two years ago when he unexpectedly returned home to try to lead opposition protests. He has since alleged that he was poisoned in custody by Russian agents. His weight has halved to barely 60kg and his ­allies say they fear for his life. “My case is clearly part of a bigger hybrid war,” Saakashvili wrote.

He has accused the ruling Georgian Dream party of taking the country back into Moscow’s orbit.

Saakashvili says Georgia’s turn to Moscow is being orchestrated by Bidzina Ivanishvili, the oligarch who founded the Georgian Dream party and briefly served as prime minister before retiring from public life in 2021.

The Times