THEY were just students when they first met. Petro Poroshenko and Mikheil Saakashvili were two ambitious young men at Kiev’s Taras Shevchenko University in the late 1980s. Mr Saakashvili went on to become president of Georgia in 2004, where he pursued an aggressive agenda of reforms before his party lost power in 2012. Mr Poroshenko became the wealthy owner of a huge confectionery company, and won Ukraine’s presidency following the Maidan revolution in 2014. For help turning his country around, he turned to his old friend, inviting Mr Saakashvili in May 2015 to head the vital region of Odessa. Mr Poroshenko granted him Ukrainian citizenship and declared him “a great friend of Ukraine”.

It took little more than a year for the old friends to become bitter foes. In November 2016 Mr Saakashvili resigned and went into opposition. On July 26th the authorities announced that Mr Saakashvili’s Ukrainian citizenship had been annulled. Since Georgia’s government had revoked his Georgian citizenship when he took the Ukrainian one, he is now potentially stateless and stranded in New York, where he fled after falling out with Mr Poroshenko.

The Ukrainian migration service charged Mr Saakashvili with failing to report that he was under criminal investigation in Georgia when he applied for Ukrainian citizenship (a fact of which everyone in the country was aware). Most observers see it simply as the sidelining of a political rival. The move “returns Ukraine to the traditions of [former President Viktor] Yanukovych, to the times of manipulating the law for personal benefit and selective justice,” declared an editorial in Ukrainskaya Pravda, an influential news website.

Mr Saakashvili’s political prospects in Ukraine had already dimmed. The party he founded, the Movement of New Forces, currently polls around 2%. But his banishment is a bad omen for Ukraine. Western backers saw the reform-minded foreigners in the upper echelons of the Ukrainian government, including many Georgians who came along with Mr Saakashvili, as a sign of the new leadership’s commitment to change after the revolution. Most have since departed, citing resistance to anti-corruption reform and pressure from political insiders.

When Mr Saakashvili resigned his governorship, he accused the president of lacking the will to fight corruption. “What does it matter to Ukrainians who will treat them like dirt, Poroshenko or Yanukovych? What does it matter who will steal from them?” he said at the time. By stripping Mr Saakashvili of citizenship, Mr Poroshenko seemed to be delivering a final repudiation of the post-revolutionary era’s hopeful ethos. Some compared it to Mr Yanukovych’s jailing of his leading rival, Yulia Tymoshenko, a former prime minister, in 2011.

The attack on Mr Saakashvili also serves as an opening salvo in Ukraine’s next presidential election campaign. Mr Poroshenko will stand for a second term in 2019, and his administration is already preoccupied with securing his re-election. While Mr Poroshenko has managed to stabilise Ukraine’s economy, with the help of the International Monetary Fund, he has largely lost the support of the population. Recent polls show him trailing the resurgent Ms Tymoshenko in a presidential contest. Some 70% of Ukrainians believe the country is heading in the wrong direction.

Mr Poroshenko’s autocratic handling of Mr Saakashvili is unlikely to convince the people otherwise. The former Georgian president pledges to return and fight for his place in Ukraine. As Mustafa Nayyem, a reformist MP, wrote: “In the end, someone will win this fight between two presidents, but it won’t be Ukraine.”