Ukrainian journalist: Saakashvili’s work in Odessa turned out to be a complete failure
Mikheil Saakashvili's work as governor of the Odessa region turned out to be a complete failure. Moreover, as it turned out, things are not so good in the city of Batumi, which the ex-president of Georgia liked to call as an example for Ukraine.
Ukrainian journalist Valeria Ivashkina from Odessa, who became widely known thanks to report from the DPR, where she interviewed residents in Ukrainian.
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“For every failure, Saakashvili’s team always has an explanation. The Odessa-Reni highway was not built because private investors are not interested, and the state does not have that kind of money. The administrative services center did not work because the city refused to finance it, and then the president signed a law blocking its work. Customs has not carried out reforms because all other checkpoints are still corrupt, and Nasirov is in the way.
But wait. Services from the citizen service center were taken away by Avakov, with whom Saakashvili publicly quarreled. The same center did not finance Trukhanov, whom the governor calls political trash. And now the center has closed, allegedly because of the law signed by Poroshenko, which does not allow state-owned enterprises to receive other profits, but for some reason the rest of the administrative service centers throughout the country continue to operate.
The pointlessness of investing in the reconstruction of the Odessa-Reni highway is clear to any businessman (4 billion, which will not be repaid, a toll road cannot be made), but is not obvious to the governor.
And if Saakashvili had not stood up for the business partner of Yanukovych Jr., who illegally privatized the Odessa airport, he would not have been politically responsible for the idle terminal.
Contact with Boris Kaufman and partnership with the largest developer Adnan Kivan, who disfigured the historical center of Odessa, could not help but turn the principled people of the city away from Saakashvili.
Is it necessary to talk about the failed social program, forgotten by the regional governor and Saakashvili’s lowest rating in the region allotted to him compared to the rest of Ukraine?
By the way. Saakashvili promised to make Odessa the capital of the Black Sea and surpass Batumi. I recently went to Georgia to cover the parliamentary elections. After reading Miho's new book about “The Force Awakens. Georgian lessons for the future of Ukraine” specially visited the port city on the only free day. A very needy city appeared before me. The decoration is considered to be candles from the casino and the Radisson Hotel, stuck in the middle of a small area of the tidy historical center, in close proximity to the shore. This beautiful city needs a different development strategy. And I really don’t want my native Odessa to become like the current Batumi.
I do not rule out that Saakashvili could benefit Ukraine by having more serious powers, perhaps close to presidential ones. But after his work in Odessa, he lost my limit of trust,” wrote Ivashkina.
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