Former Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili has been transferred from Tbilisi’s Vivamedi clinic back to Rustavi Prison after more than three years of treatment, Georgia’s Special Penitentiary Service has announced.

Saakashvili, whose United National Movement (UNM) party led Georgia from 2004-13 following the Rose Revolution, is serving a combined 12.5-year sentence on several convictions, including abuse of power, embezzlement of state funds, and illegal border crossing. He is not due to be released from prison until 2032.

Upon the politician’s return to Georgia from Ukraine in 2021, he was arrested and imprisoned, after which he began a 50-day hunger strike that led to his transfer to hospital, where he spent over three years.

In a statement on November 12, the prison agency announced that Saakashvili’s health condition is now “satisfactory” and he “no longer requires in-patient treatment”.

The agency added that the former president had been discharged from the civilian clinic and returned to Rustavi’s No. 12 penitentiary facility, where he would continue serving his sentence.

The special Penitentiary Service further noted that transfers from civilian hospitals are made “based on the decision of the treating doctor, considering his health condition”, as cited by Interpress.

Vivamedi clinical director Zurab Chkhaidze told Georgian channel TV Pirveli that the transfer “was not carried out by any use of force,” noting that Saakashvili “received the news very calmly”.

Saakashvili, however, writing in a Facebook post, claimed he was returned to prison “without warning” and was met there by “precisely those people who poisoned me in March 2022” shortly before he was transferred to the clinic.

The ex-president thanked the Vivamedi doctors who “fought for [his] life” and claimed the billionaire founder of the ruling Georgian Dream party, Bidzina Ivanishvili, was behind his sudden transfer back to the Rustavi penitentiary.

Saakashvili argued that his return to prison is intended to “intimidate” his “numerous supporters” and to send “a specific message to the West and Ukraine”, where he noted he remains registered as chairman of President Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s Reform Council.

Supporters of the former president, including UNM members, denounced the transfer as politically motivated.

“Mikheil Saakashvili has in fact been sentenced to life imprisonment, so the only thing left for the regime was to tighten his prison conditions or, in Putin's style, to directly bring him to death,” UNM chair Tina Bokuchava said, as cited by Interpress.