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What happened to Saakashvili and Zijlstra in February 2018?
Summary
A look back at two political developments reported on 12 February 2018, one in Kyiv and one in The Hague, as seen from 13 February 2018.
What was the political news that reached readers on 13 February 2018? It concerned events reported a day earlier, on 12 February 2018, involving two figures linked to Ukraine by very different routes.
In Kyiv, Mikheil Saakashvili, leader of the opposition Movement of New Forces party, was detained by the Ministry of Internal Affairs and deported from Ukraine to Poland. Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko had stripped him of Ukrainian citizenship on 26 July 2017.
The same day, Halbe Zijlstra, Foreign Minister of the Netherlands, admitted to lying about attending a meeting with Vladimir Putin in 2006. He had earlier said that Putin mentioned plans to expand Russia to include Belarus, Ukraine and the Baltic states. He now said he had not been present and had borrowed the story from a source.
The two reports were unconnected in their circumstances. One concerned the removal of an opposition leader from Ukraine; the other concerned a European minister correcting an account of remarks on Ukraine and its neighbours.
