'We Will Wring the Neck of the Ukrainian Oligarchy,' Vows Deported Saakashvili

Corruption is Everywhere - Definitely in the Ukraine

By Jonathon Gatehouse, CBC News

Mikhail Saakashvili is gone from Ukraine, but he is unwilling to be forgotten.

The former president of Georgia, who became an ally and then a foe of Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, gave a fiery press conference in Warsaw, Poland, this morning following his forced deportation from Kiev yesterday.

"Poroshenko believes that he has beaten off the opponent whom he is fearful of the most. He falsified a case against me and threw me out of the country," said the 50-year-old opposition leader.

Ukrainian opposition figure Mikheil Saakashvili arrives for a news conference in Warsaw, Poland, on Tuesday.

(Kacper Pempel/Reuters)

"We will wring the neck of the Ukrainian oligarchy. They will be sent to prison, where they belong. I promise this."

The falling out between Saakashvili and Poroshenko, once university chums and then political admirers who bonded over their mutual mistrust of Russia, is operatic in scale.

Living in exile in the United States after his 2012 electoral defeat, and facing corruption charges at home, Saakashvili accepted his old friend's offer to become governor of Odessa in early 2015.

Saakashvili supporters rally in Kiev on Feb. 4. (Gleb Garanich/Reuters)

In the months that followed, Ukraine denied Georgia's attempts to extradite Saakashvili and even granted him citizenship.

But relations between the two leaders quickly soured. Saakashvili resigned from his job in late 2016 and started his own anti-corruption political party, the Movement of New Forces.

Last summer, Poroshenko stripped him of his Ukrainian citizenship while he was outside the country. In September Saakashvili stormed back across the border with Poland, carried by a crowd of supporters.

For months, he and members of his party have staged almost daily demonstrations outside of Ukraine's parliament calling for Poroshenko's ouster.

Saakashvili is detained by officers of the Security Service of Ukraine outside his apartment in Kiev on Dec. 5, 2017. (Valentyn Ogirenko/Reuters)

An initial attempt to deport Saakashvili last December was foiled by angry protesters who gathered outside of his Kiev apartment and pulled him from a police van.

But yesterday, Ukrainian authorities had the element of surprise when they descended on the opposition leader while he was eating lunch in a Georgian restaurant. CCTV footage shows helmeted riot police placing a bag over Saakashvili's head and hustling him out of the building.  An hour later, he was aboard a chartered jet on its way to Warsaw.

Saakashvili, who is now technically stateless, having given up his Georgian citizenship in 2015, says the fight is not over.

Ukrainians holding a banner reading 'Poroshenko is not our president' demonstrate in front of President Petro Poroshenko's office in Kiev on Monday.

(Sergei Supinsky/AFP/Getty Images)

Addressing Ukraine's "idiots" at today's press conference, he vowed to recover his passport and head back to Kiev.

"I will be almost as efficient in Europe over the next few weeks as I used to be in Ukraine," he said, and then switched into the third person.

"Saakashvili at liberty is more dangerous for Poroshenko than Saakashvili whom they persecuted in Ukraine. We will peacefully oust the oligarchs from power."

Only 3% of 2.2mn Migrants Who Entered Europe Since 2015 Sent Home – Pew Research

FILE PHOTO © Wolfgang Rattay / Reuters

More than half of the immigrants who arrived in the EU, Norway and Switzerland in 2015 and 2016 still have no legal asylum status, and only 3 percent of the 2.2 million newcomers were returned to their homeland.

Meanwhile, those rejected for asylum are likely to “disappear” rather than allow themselves to be deported, the paper indicates.

The most systematic study of the biggest migration wave in Europe since World War II has been conducted by the Pew Research Center on the basis of official Eurostat data, and shows that the continent still has not dealt with the migrant crisis.

 Although the peak of media attention came in 2015, when 1.3 million asylum applications were filed, almost as many – 1.2 million – came in 2016, many from migrants who arrived the previous year, before moving to a different destination inside Europe in the hope of better chances of citizenship and a better livelihood. Germany was the most popular application country, taking 45 percent of all the asylum seekers on the continent.

Forty percent of all applicants have been approved, with the highest rate of acceptance among those who said they were fleeing from Syria, 80 percent of whom have no legal residence in Europe. On the other hand, only 2 percent of the 80,000 Albanians, whose homeland is not suffering from any recognized humanitarian crisis, have been designated as refugees.

But this does not mean they were forced to go home: 89 percent of all Albanian immigrants are still inside the EU, waiting for their initial application and appeal to go through, and only 9 percent have given up and decided to travel back across the border. Similarly, 77 percent of Kosovars, Afghans and Iranians are still being processed, with many banned from working officially and resident in temporary state-provided accommodation.

In total, 52 percent of all immigrants are still in the application phase.

Thus, only 8 percent of newcomers have been definitively told that they cannot stay in Europe. The location of majority of those – some 5 percent of the total migrant influx, or more than 100,000 people – is listed as “unknown,” suggesting that they may have settled somewhere illegally, left Europe, or changed identity in another bid for residency within the EU.

Though varying backgrounds of the migrants makes direct comparisons difficult, the most welcoming European countries are the Netherlands (52 percent of applicants approved), Germany (50 percent) and Sweden (48 percent). The least likely to grant asylum is Hungary, which has given green light to just 1 percent of all asylum claims.