Ukraine’s last best hope

You have to hand it to Mikheil Saakashvili: the man doesn’t give up. After a tumultuous nine years as president of Georgia, which began with a furious anti-corruption purge, culminated in a short but disastrous war with Russia in 2008 and ended with accusations of embezzlement and authoritarian practices, he is determined to return to power — not in his own country, but in Ukraine.

Saakashvili is brilliant and divisive. His many fans, principally drawn from the educated and the young of Georgia and Ukraine, see him as exactly the kind of clear-thinking, fearless leader who can sweep away the tangle of cronyism that has turned most former Soviet states into kleptocratic autocracies. To the sceptics, who include the many hundreds of thousands of officials he has put out of a job, he’s a reckless risk-taker who provoked Russia into invading the breakaway Georgian territories of Abkhazia and South Ossetia in 2008.