Mikheil Saakashvili, the former Georgian president who went on to become a leading Ukrainian politician, has warned Ukraine "will continue to break up" unless the government improves the economy and reins in the scourge of corruption that has blighted the country since independence.

Made stateless after Petro Poroshenko, Ukraine’s president, rescinded his Ukrainian citizenship in July the 49-year-old Saakashvili made a dramatic to return to Ukraine earlier this month when a crowd of supporters broke through police lines on the Ukrainian-Polish border and swept him back into the country illegally.

Now back in his adopted home despite his lack of a Ukrainian passport he is travelling around the country, determined to be a thorn in the flesh of a government he feels has done too little to tackle corruption and improve the economy.

Without reform, he says, the government risks failing to hold a country together that has already lost control of territory to Russian-backed separatist in the east.

"If Ukraine doesn’t change it will continue to break up," he told The Telegraph. “You go to the east and you see whole cities that no longer trade with Russia and are really in a desperate situation. They don’t have any prospects and there is no light at the end of the tunnel for them.