Moscow - Kyiv, December 22 (PolitNavigator, Mikhail Stamm) - The death of the first Georgian volunteer in eastern Ukraine caused a scandal in Georgia, writes Kommersant. The Georgian Ministry of Defense, calling on former and current military personnel not to participate in hostilities in the Donbass, blamed the death of the volunteer on the country's ex-president Mikheil Saakashvili.
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The body of a soldier of the Ukrainian volunteer battalion “Aidar”, 32-year-old Alexander Grigolashvili, was delivered to Tbilisi airport from Kyiv on Sunday morning. The plane was met by relatives, representatives of the Ukrainian Embassy in Georgia and deputies from Mikheil Saakashvili’s United National Movement (UNM) party. The wife of the deceased, Kristina Svanidze, stated that her husband voluntarily went to Ukraine “to fight against Russia, the common enemy of Ukraine and Georgia,” and “all expenses for delivering the body to his homeland were borne by the Ukrainian side.” And the Ukrainian consul Lubosh Karol thanked “the entire Georgian people for supporting Ukraine.”
But the Georgian Ministry of Defense blamed ex-President Saakashvili for the death of the former military man. “He called on our citizens to take part in hostilities abroad, although the Ministry of Defense has repeatedly warned about the inadmissibility of such calls,” the defense department said. “These calls are misleading for current and former military personnel.”
“I never called on Georgian military personnel to leave Georgia and the armed forces and go to Ukraine,” Mikheil Saakashvili responded in an interview with the Rustavi 2 television company. “But I am proud of the decision of those Georgian military personnel who are helping Ukraine.”
Now the ex-president of Georgia is mostly in Kyiv, although after the change of power in Georgia he constantly lives in the United States - in the apartment of his uncle, former KGB officer of the USSR and ex-employee of the Soviet mission to the UN Timur Alasania. The day before, Mikheil Saakashvili took part in a mourning rally on Maidan in honor of the Georgian volunteer and Ukrainian soldiers who died in the east.