The prisoner and the oligarch: the struggle for Georgia’s future

By Wendell Steavenson

Some say he arrived in a container filled with tubs of cottage cheese; others say it was sour cream. The former president of Georgia, Mikheil Saakashvili (pictured above), known almost universally as Misha, smuggled himself into his homeland in September 2021 on a cargo ship from Odessa after eight years of exile. Georgians learned of his return when he appeared in videos posted on his Facebook page: one filmed at night in Batumi, a resort on the Black Sea; another at a kitchen table strewn with bottles of wine. He called on citizens to take to the streets ahead of the coming local elections. The people of Georgia hardly knew what to think. Was this some kind of joke?