Saakashvili banned from entering Ukraine till 2021:
By RFE/RL
Ukraine's border service has banned Mikheil Saakashvili from entering Ukraine for three years, days after he was expelled from the country.
Saakashvili on February 21 posted on Facebook a document from the border service that said his entry ban runs until February 13, 2021.
Ukrainian border-service spokesman Oleh Slobodyan confirmed that Saakashvili was banned on the orders of the commander in charge of the Ukrainian border section he crossed in September 2017, eluding a blockade.
Saakashvili responded defiantly to the ban, writing on Facebook, "With or without me, the end has already come for these authorities, and I will return home to Ukraine very soon now, much, much sooner than in three years."
Saakashvili, 50, was drafted in 2015 by Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko to head the Odesa region. But he fell afoul of his friend over corruption allegations and calls for reform and was stripped of his citizenship in July 2017.
After beginning an opposition campaign to Poroshenko, Saakashvili was detained at a Kyiv restaurant on February 12, taken to the airport, and flown to Poland, the country from which he returned to Ukraine in September.
He eventually flew to the Netherlands, his wife's home country, and vowed to continue his battle to topple Poroshenko.
Ukrainian authorities have accused Saakashvili of abetting an alleged "criminal group" led by Viktor Yanukovych, the Moscow-friendly former president who fled the country in 2014 amid massive protests known as the Euromaidan.
The authorities also alleged that the street protests he led are part of a Russian plot against the government in Kyiv.
Saakashvili has denied all the charges, calling them "absurd" and politically motivated.
Saakashvili was also the president of Georgia from 2004-2013 and is wanted there after being convicted of abuse of power in connection with a 2006 murder case. He has been sentenced in absentia to three years in prison.
He also denies charges of wrongdoing in Georgia. (w/AFP, UNIAN)
This ends our live blogging for February 21. Be sure to check back tomorrow for our continuing coverage.
Here's an item on the Yanukovych trial from RFE/RL's news desk:
Poroshenko Calls Russia 'Aggressor' In Yanukovych Trial
During testimony at his ousted predecessor's treason trial, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko has called Russia "an aggressor country" that planned "a well-coordinated hybrid war against Ukraine."
In video-link testimony at Viktor Yanukovych's trial, Poroshenko said that, in February 2014, when Yanukovych fled to Russia in the face of pro-European protests, Moscow implemented its plan to seize Ukraine's Crimea region and instigate separatism in Ukraine’s eastern regions of Dnipropetrovsk, Kharkiv, Odesa, Luhansk, and Donetsk.
"Crimea's annexation was part of Russia's hybrid war against Ukraine," Poroshenko said, adding that he traveled to Crimea in late February 2014 and witnessed how the Russian military was annexing the peninsula.
"Tens of thousands of Russian military personnel that were stationed in Sevastopol [a Black Sea port in Crimea], and tens of thousands of Russian military personnel from inner Russia were involved in the operation to seize the Ukrainian territory," Poroshenko said.
He also said he was not able to come to the courtroom and was testifying via a video-link on February 21 due to his "busy schedule and important state issues."
Answering a question from a defense lawyer about an agreement on a peaceful solution to the political crisis signed at the time by Yanukovych and the Ukrainian opposition, Poroshenko said he had never seen that document and was not present when it was signed.
'Unfolding Aggression'
Poroshenko added that he had voted for the transfer of presidential powers from the "missing" Yanukovych to then Parliament Speaker Oleksandr Turchynov.
"In the face of the unfolding aggression against our country, we had to do something, as Yanukovych was absent, unreachable. His whereabouts were unknown, and we could not just sit and wait and see what was going to happen.
"The challenges our country was facing then were serious and we were responsible for the nation, for Ukraine's future generations," Poroshenko said.
After the defense tried to challenge Poroshenko several times with questions about the legitimacy of Yanukovych's powers being transferred to Turchynov in February 2014, the judge stopped the questioning, saying that the attorneys' questions were unrelated to the essence of the case.
The Ukrainian protests known as Euromaidan began in November 2013, when demonstrators gathered in central Kyiv after Yanukovych announced he was postponing plans to sign an Association Agreement with the European Union and would seek closer economic ties with Russia.
Ukrainian prosecutors say 104 people were killed and 2,500 injured in the protests that centered on Kyiv's Maidan Nezalezhnosti -- Independence Square.
Shunning a Western-backed and Russian-backed deal with the opposition to end the standoff, Yanukovych abandoned power and fled Kyiv on February 21, 2014.
The former president, who took refuge in Russia, denies ordering police to fire on protesters and claims the violence was a "planned operation" to overthrow his government.
Moscow responded to his downfall by seizing control of Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula in March 2014 and fomenting separatism across much of the country -- one of the causes of a war that has killed more than 10,300 people in eastern Ukraine since April 2014 and displaced more than 1.6 million Ukrainians.
Meanwhile, the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv said on February 21 that Deputy Secretary of State John Sullivan, who is in Ukraine, had visited a memorial on Independence Square that is dedicated to the "Heavenly Hundred" -- a name commonly used to refer to those who died during the Maidan protests.
Sullivan is due to meet with Poroshenko, Prime Minister Volodymyr Hroysman, and Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin in Kyiv later on February 21.
Sullivan "will stress the importance of Ukraine expeditiously implementing credible economic and anti-corruption reforms and will underscore U.S. support for Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity," the State Department said in a statement on February 20.