Spat between Arsen Avakov and Mikheil Saakashvili follows a brawl between an MP and the prime minister last week

Chaos broke out at a Ukrainian government meeting on Monday after the interior minister threw water in the face of Mikheil Saakashvili, formerly president of Georgia and now governor of Ukraine’s Odessa region.

Arsen Avakov wrote on Facebook that Saakashvili had been “hysterical” during the meeting of the National Reform Council, and was screaming insults at him. “I refrained from hitting him, and just threw water in his face,” the minister wrote. “It’s a long time since I’ve seen such a bonkers populist. Nobody could get a word in edgeways, he was interrupting everyone including the president.”

Saakashvili made a video address criticising Avakov and the prime minister, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, for their behaviour.

“The prime minister called me a visiting performer, told me to get out of the country, and I’m not even going to repeat the other filth he said. I have seen a lot of prime ministers and presidents, and in an informal setting anything goes. But at a meeting of that level, with the president, the whole government present, I have never seen such behaviour.”

The president, Petro Poroshenko, appointed Saakashvili to run Odessa in May. Some saw it as a masterstroke, believing an outsider might have success at breaking the corruption which has strangled the port city, while others said appointing the controversial politician was a recipe for disaster.

During his time in charge of Georgia, he introduced a number of reforms, but also lost a war to Russia over South Ossetia, and was accused of having authoritarian tendencies. Saakashvili took Ukrainian citizenship to take up the Odessa post, and this month was stripped of his Georgian citizenship. He is wanted on various charges in Georgia, but dismisses the cases as retribution by his political enemies.

Alongside shaking things up in Odessa, Saakashvili has become embroiled in an increasingly public spat with Yatsenyuk, publicly accusing the prime minister and his associates of corruption. There has been speculation both that Saakashvili is after the PM’s job, and that he is being used as an “attack dog” for Poroshenko, who has fallen out with his prime minister.

A brawl broke out in parliament last week as Yatsenyuk addressed MPs. Oleh Barna, from Poroshenko’s ruling coalition, approached the prime minister, handed him a bunch of flowers, and attempted to remove him from the speaker’s podium forcefully, by slipping a hand through his legs and lifting him by the crotch.



Avakov wrote on Facebook that Barna had wanted to feel Yatsenyuk’s testicles, and discovered the prime minister had “balls of steel”.

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Such public buffoonery has depressed many Ukrainians who expected a new kind of politics after last year’s Maidan revolution. It looks particularly bad just a week after the US vice president, Joe Biden, visited Kiev and addressed the Ukrainian parliament with an impassioned plea not to ruin the historical chance to fight corruption and modernise the country.

“Such street-style skirmishes shame the country,” presidential spokesman Svyatoslav Tsegolko wrote on Facebook on Tuesday over the spat between Saakashvili and Avakov.

But MPs said Poroshenko had to make a decision now about the fragile coalition. Yatsenyuk has very low popularity ratings, but some analysts say the coalition is the only way to get further reforms through parliament. The events of the past week suggest that tensions are at breaking point, however.



MP Mustafa Nayyem wrote on his Facebook page: “This hell will keep going until Poroshenko states his position. A governor can’t accuse the prime minister of corruption and keep his post! Or if he does, it means either he is telling the truth, or people are scared of him, or they are using him.”

He added that in the case of Saakashvili, it appeared the president was using him, and the prime minister was scared of him.