Mikheil Saakashvili, the former president of Georgia and ex-governor of the Odessa region in Ukraine, said in a Facebook post on July 27 that he will fight Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko's decision to strip him of his Ukrainian citizenship.

Known for his anti-corruption fights in Georgia and Ukraine, his populism and his outspoken ways, Saakashvili became a stateless person overnight when the Ukrainian immigration service announced that it had decided to strip him of his citizenship. The reason given was that he is wanted in Georgia by investigators probing corruption and abuse of power during his two terms as president there, which ended in 2013. However, some observers speculate that the real reason is the mending of ties between Kyiv and Tbilisi.

Having come to power after the 2003 Rose Revolution in Georgia, Saakashvili originally enjoyed widespread support for his anti-corruption fight, but that waned in his later years in power amidst revelations of widespread abuse of the power of state institutions. After the party he founded, United National Movement (UNM), lost the parliamentary election in 2012 and his second term ended, he moved to Ukraine, where his former university friend Petro Poroshenko had been elected president. He was granted citizenship and appointed governor of the Odessa region.

Shortly after, Georgian authorities stripped him of his Georgian citizenship, claiming that Georgia does not allow dual citizenship. That stipulation is mainly meant to prevent citizens of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, two breakaway regions that are fighting for independence, from holding dual Georgian-Abkhaz or Georgian-South Ossetian citizenship. At the time, Saakashvili accused his main opponent, Georgian billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili, of seeking a political vendetta. In November 2016, Saakashvili resigned from the governorship of Odessa, accusing Poroshenko of hampering his efforts to crack down on corruption.

"Poroshenko travelled to Georgia not in order to establish ties between the two countries, but in order to come to another agreement, this time between two oligarchist regimes, that of the Ukraianian Poroshenko and the biggest shareholder in Gazprom, the pro-Russian Ivanishvili," Saakashvili wrote referring to Poroshenko's visit to Tbilisi in mid-July.

In the Facebook post, he vowed to continue fighting the decision to remove his citizenship. "Now there is an attempt under way to force me to become a refugee. This will not happen! I will not remain anywhere else and will not change status! I will fight for my legal right to return to Ukraine!" he wrote.

Saakashvili is currently in the US, where he travelled before the announcement. US authorities have not commented on the possibility of granting him asylum. If he returns to Ukraine, he risks being deported to Georgia, where he will face prosecution. According to the Ukrainian constitution, the country's president oversees decisions regarding the removal or granting of citizenship.

Georgia's chief prosecutor Irakli Shotadze said that his office was cooperating with the Ukrainian prosecutor general's office on Saakashvili's extradition, Interpress news agency reported on July 27.