Former Georgian president: Putin will push everywhere

Former Georgian president: Putin will push everywhere

"Putin does not respect national borders and striker everywhere. predicted that Ukraine would be next in 2008, and that the Baltics would be next,” he said. The paper noted that "he believes his prescience at that time means that people should pay attention to what he thinks now."

Exiled from Georgia, where he is accused of organized crime, Saakashvili has been given Ukrainian citizenship and has become of the closest associates of Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko.

“There is no way that they will not go to the Baltics next. There is no way that they will not revisit Georgia or Azerbaijan. Putin is obsessed with the idea of testing NATO - this was clear in my long conversations with him. Putin said three major things. One, we will make Georgia like Northern Cyprus. The second was that Ukraine was not a country but a territory. And the third thing was that the Baltic countries were not defendable. He said all these things, until we were no longer on talking terms," Saakashvili told the British paper, which said that the conflict with Putin came "after the flare-up of tensions in South Ossetia."

“Putin doesn’t like me or people like me. We defied Putin’s understanding of what the post-Soviet world was to be," he said, and added that "under his watch in Georgia there were many times less criminality than in Russia and it was the least corrupt country in the region.“

"All these things make him nervous. And I think that’s he’s still very worried about Ukraine. Because if Ukraine makes it, everything built around him will collapse," Saakashvili said, of Putin.