KYIV – In July 2015, less than two months after his one-time college chum President Petro Poroshenko appointed him as governor of the strategic Black Sea region of Odesa, Mikheil Saakashvili deployed a bulldozer through an oligarch’s beachfront property to give the public access to the seashore.
It was a display of his proclaimed resolve to sever the seemingly blurry nexus of politics and business, and clean up the region whose ports historically have served as a transit point for all sorts of vice and tax evasion.
To replicate the feat, the former Georgian president, whom the World Bank named the world’s top reformer in 2006 for reducing graft and opening his country up to business, brought in a young, highly educated team, some of them from his homeland, others from the West.
They included David Sakvarelidze, who would simultaneously serve as the Odesa Oblast’s prosecutor and as one of the country’s deputy prosecutors general.
After 17 months on the job, however, the energetic former president of Georgia resigned on November 7, accusing his boss and local mafia clans allegedly loyal to him of sabotaging him at every step, casting the sincerity of Ukraine’s overall reform project in doubt.
“The president personally supports two clans,” Mr. Saakashvili told a group of journalists. “Odesa can only develop once Kyiv will be freed from these bribe-takers, who directly patronize organized crime and lawlessness.”
The president’s office subsequently accepted his resignation. Svyatoslav Tseholko, the president’s spokesperson, couldn’t be reached for comment.
Lauded by Ukraine observers as a potential model for emulation nationwide, Mr. Saakashvili had slashed his Soviet-era staff by half to 400 and replaced department heads with his young crew, according to the Kennan Institute in Kyiv.
“It took the new governor only three months to launch the new Odesa police force and five to open the transparent Odesa Center for Administrative Services,” Kennan Institute’s Kateryna Smagliy wrote in an essay for the Atlantic Council in Washington.
One of the change-makers was Yuliya Marushevska, who became a visible face for the Euro-Maidan Revolution on YouTube during the tumultuous three-month upheaval that saw disgraced ex-President Viktor Yanukovych abandon office as a result. Despite her inexperience, she took charge of the local customs office and reduced inspections to only 15 minutes per container at the port while removing numerous tax evasion schemes.
Taking advantage of newly enacted “decentralization” laws, Mr. Saakashvili’s oblast administration envisioned keeping more revenue at bay instead of sending it to state coffers to repave the region’s dilapidated roads, whose disrepair had cut off whole communities from the region’s capital.
Bolhrad, where Mr. Poroshenko was born and a city 241 kilometers from Odesa near the pro-Russian breakaway region of Transdniester, is literally cut off due to unnavigable potholes and unpaved roads that are dirt-filled. It should take about three hours for the drive, but now takes more than six hours to reach the border town that has access to more Russian television channels than Ukrainian ones, according to a Financial Times report from earlier this year.
Yet Mr. Saakashvili never got the needed support from Kyiv, he told journalists as he tendered his resignation. And the more strides he made, the more roadblocks the 48-year-old Columbia Law School graduate encountered.
For example, shippers started registering with the Kyiv customs service to deprive the Odesa branch of revenues for reaching a benchmark from which it could start filling the budget to repair roads.
Mr. Sakvarelidze had started probing local wrongdoing by mafia clans, including allegedly those by the current Odesa mayor, Gennadiy Trukhanov, who has Russian citizenship and ties to the underworld dating over two decades. Investigations had stalled before Mr. Sakvarelidze’s outgoing allegedly corrupt superior, Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin, fired him after only six months on the job.
Mr. Trukhanov’s mayoral office couldn’t be reached for comment before The Ukrainian Weekly went to print.
Ms. Marushevska then quit seven days after the governor’s resignation. Prosecutors had launched seven investigations into her office’s activities for alleged wrongdoing, but no charges have been filed so far.
“I was left, instead, with the impression that local leaders of the president’s party were working to undermine the anti-corruption efforts,” Mr. Saakashvili said in an opinion piece for The New York Times on November 16. “My administration was starved of funding for months, the appointment of several of my key deputies has been stalled, and some of our most able reformers have quit in frustration.”
Georgian colleagues left holding other positions, among them national police chief Khatia Dekanoidze on November 14, who oversaw the swearing in of about 13,000 patrol officers in 32 cities, including near the three war zones of Kramatorsk, Sloviansk and Mariupol – all in embattled Donetsk Oblast.
Speaking of having no backing from the capital, Mr. Saakashvili said, “When I came here, I wanted there to be the same tempo of development as in Batumi,” as quoted by the Financial Times. He was referring to a Georgian Black Sea coast city that was overhauled after being freed of criminal gangs during his presidency.
Much of what was supposed to change in Odesa Oblast was dependent on the central authorities, including the splintered Parliament where Mr. Poroshenko holds a paper-thin majority.
According to the Kennan Institute in Kyiv, “Saakashvili’s team set up the Odesa Package of Reforms initiative and submitted dozens of legislative proposals to the Verkhovna Rada… Yet not a single one of those has ever been voted in – some got ‘lost’ at their respective ministries, while others got stuck in parliamentary committees.”
Despite the accusations, Mr. Poroshenko’s administration has achieved much in the past two and a half years since the Euro-Maidan Revolution, according to the Reanimation Package of Reforms, a loose coalition of Western-educated Ukrainian professionals dedicated to change.
Regarding the relegation of more powers to regional and local governments, and communities – known as decentralization – the group said in a report this month that budget revenues in the first half of 2016 increased in “territorial communities” by more than three times compared with the same period last year to 1.3 billion hrv ($53 million U.S.).
Other accomplishments include the rollout of a new police force, the eschewing of direct Russian natural gas supplies, an electronic public procurement system that has saved millions of dollars, and the creation of three graft-fighting institutions.
Ever the politician, Mr. Saakashvili’s track record and his true intentions have been questioned by some. He had never publicly criticized his one-time university mate Mr. Poroshenko until his resignation, yet lashed out at his inner-circle during his governorship. The English- and Ukrainian-speaking Georgian also started a nationwide corruption-fighting group with opposition-minded members of Parliament while still in office. Only last month, when he failed to win a seat in Georgia’s parliamentary election, did he resign his post.
“Sure, Saakashvili is a pop star in politics,” Ms. Smagliy of the Kennan Institute told The Ukrainian Weekly over the phone. “But his resignation is only one bit of the puzzle… he resigned not only because of the fight with oligarchs or his own inability to deliver [on reforms], he ran for Georgia’s Parliament, so where’s the commitment? Either you serve the Ukrainian or the Georgian government.”
She continued: “He realized to save his own political star he should no longer live in the Odesa swamp and start doing political stuff, and that only is possible if one is independent… He’s probably tired of being Poroshenko’s puppet.”
Mr. Saakashvili is now joining the opposition with a new political party that has all the signs of being populist, a trend spreading across Europe and the kind of sentiment that American president-elect Donald Trump captured to his ascendency this month.
Any political force the Georgian heads would enjoy only 2 percent of the public’s votes, according to a nationwide public opinion survey commissioned in October by the International Republican Institute.
“On balance, we see no immediate political implications but, depending on Saakashvili’s ability to emerge as a uniting opposition figure, next year could herald a new round of political turbulence, potentially resurrecting the prospect of early parliamentary elections should the government fail to act on its low approval ratings by delivering some notable reform successes,” Kyiv-base Dragon Capital investment bank noted in a note to investors last week.