Georgia’s ex-President Mikheil Saakashvili on Monday was handed 12 years and six months in prison after a court found him guilty of illegally crossing the border into the country.
After hearing the sentence, Saakashvili said the verdict was “illegal and shameful.”
The former leader faced a total of five charges, including embezzlement and abuse of power, all of which he said are politically motivated. He was already sentenced to nine years in prison last week, which has now been topped up to nearly 13.
The court is yet to rule on the only remaining charge against him, which concerns the violent suppression of anti-government protests by Saakashvili’s administration in 2007.
The Georgian ex-president was arrested in October 2021, after making a surprise comeback from self-imposed exile abroad, and has been in detention ever since.
Saakashvili pursued a pro-Western agenda during his presidency between 2004 and 2013, but his popularity waned after Russia’s 2008 invasion of Georgia. A fifth of Georgia’s territory remains under Russian occupation and the control of separatist regimes.
Saakashvili’s government was ousted from power in 2012 by the Georgian Dream party, which initially continued his pro-Western foreign policy but has been cleaving closer to Moscow since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine started in 2022.
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