Ex-Pres Saakashvili warns: any prisoner deal would come at cost of Georgia’s freedom

Former Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili on Friday urged the Georgian public to oppose any deal that would exchange political prisoners for sanctions relief, saying such a bargain would come “at the expense of Georgia’s freedom.”

In a social-media post, Saakashvili called political prisoners “a tradable currency for dictators,” arguing that the longer detainees remain jailed, the higher their value becomes in bargaining with foreign governments.

“Dictators use political prisoners as a trading currency: the more they are sentenced and the longer they sit, the more their price rises. The Georgian people must not allow such trade,” he wrote.

Saakashvili suggested that recent detentions — he referred to the arrest of opposition figure Levan Khabeishvili — fit into a pattern in which the ruling authorities seek to trade prisoner releases for easing international pressure. He claimed that the ruling circle had hoped a late invitation to OSCE/ODIHR and other diplomatic moves would produce relief from sanctions, but when that failed they turned to mass arrests as leverage.

“Either we stop this very soon, or this deal will be struck at the cost of Georgia’s freedom,” Saakashvili warned, adding that he expects further attempts to use political detainees in negotiations with the West.

Saakashvili also said his own legal fate was still being affected: “Today they will add more years to me. That sentence should have been delivered in August, but it was postponed,” he wrote, repeating long-running complaints about his prosecutions.