Saturday, May 30, 2015

Ukraine president appoints ex-Georgia leader Saakashvili regional governor

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko Saturday appointed fiercely pro-Western former Georgian leader Mikhail Saakashvili, who once fought a war with Russia, governor of the strategic Odessa region.

Poroshenko made the annoucement at a televised event in the Black Sea port alongside Saakashvili, calling the former Georgian president a "great friend of Ukraine."

"There remain a large number of problems in Odessa: preserving sovereignty, territorial integrity, independence and peace," Poroshenko said.

The controversial announcement of the flamboyant Saakashvili as head of the southern coastal region is a pointed signal from Kiev to Moscow that it remains set on its pro-European course despite a bloody separatist conflict in the east blamed on the Kremlin.

"Our main aim is to leave behind the artificial conflicts that have been artificially imposed on this amazing society," Saakashvili said after his appointment.

"Together with the president and his team we are all going to build a new Ukraine."

During his time at the helm in Georgia, reformist Saakashvili, 47, became an arch-nemesis of the Russian leadership as he dragged his tiny ex-Soviet homeland out of Moscow's orbit and closer to the West after taking power in a popular revolution in 2003.

The collapse in relations spiraled into open conflict in 2008 when Russian defeated Georgia in a five-day war over the breakaway region of South Ossetia....

 AFP
TV5F.COM
30/5/15
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2 comments :

  1. Ukrainian lawmaker no good can be expected from Saakashvili’s appointment...

    Nothing good can be expected from Georgian ex-president Mikhail Saakashvili’s appointment as governor of Ukraine’s Odessa region, a Ukrainian lawmaker said on Sunday.

    "Odessa have seen various governors and now - a former Georgian president," Vitaly Barvinenko said, adding that Kiev seemed to deliberately appoint people far from regional politics to govern Ukrainian regions. "By the way, after Saakashvili’s appointment it looked like he did not discriminate between the posts of the region governor and the Odessa mayor," he said.

    The situation in Ukrainian regions, according to Barvinenko, is being aggravated by the conflict between the president and the prime minister who have been unable to reach an agreement on candidates for heads of regional administrations for over a year.

    "The solution, as usual, is obvious - it will suffice to conduct a promised constitutional reform and decentralization, to wind up regional and district administrations and refer their competences to executive committees of local legislatures. It means to remove ‘supervisors’ from Kiev allow local legislatures to elect executive heads by themselves. After such reform, they will be answerable to local communities but not to the chiefs from Kiev," the lawmaker said......TASS

    ReplyDelete
  2. Saakashvili, Ukraine’s governor in Odessa, dismisses 20 senior officials...

    The new chief of the Odessa regional state administration, Mikhail Saakashvili, has cracked down on the departments of internal audit and cooperation with law enforcement agencies and of the prevention of and struggle with corruption. Having heard 2014 performance reports by the heads of these two agencies last year Saakashvili said they were doing nothing and ordered the dismissal of all staff.

    "You are being dismissed for doing nothing at all. People are complaining about bribers and extortions. In the meantime, you say everything is fine and nobody has been punished. We will rely on the public. We will find experienced auditors, accountants and other specialists, who will be addressing these issues instead of the negligent bureaucrats," local media quote Saakashvili as saying.

    He promised that he would identify the sources of funds to pay public activists for their efforts and grant them appropriate powers.

    This is not the first mass dismissal of officials in the Odessa region over the past month............http://tass.ru/en/world/805953
    4/7/15

    ReplyDelete

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