After an hours-long standoff with law-enforcement, supporters of Mikheil Saakashvili gathered outside Ukraine's parliament on December 5 in the hundreds to demand the impeachment of Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko. The rally follows a failed attempt by special forces to detain the former Georgian president on charges of allegedly plotting to overthrow Poroshenko and collaborating with "the Russian side."
Addressing supporters on Maidan, Ukraine’s revolutionary epicenter, Saakashvili, now an opposition politician battling the Ukrainian government over rampant corruption, vowed that Poroshenko will pay for his actions. “Poroshenko will never become Putin, because Ukrainians are a freedom-loving nation,” he thundered to ovations by a crowd of a few hundred flanked by law enforcement. “Today we have to show them the power of Kyiv . . . and the power of Ukraine.”
Wearing a scarf in the colors of the Ukrainian flag, he declared that he would stay in front of parliament "until these falsifiers will be forced to resign."
Ukrainian General Prosecutor Yuri Lutsenko, however, told parliament in the late afternoon on December 5 that his office would do "everything" to ensure Saakashvili's arrest "within the nearest 24 hours."
Disheveled and with his arms locked behind his back, Saakashvili had been pulled down from the roof of his Kyiv apartment by a Ukrainian special-forces team earlier in the day and forced into a police van.
