A Foreign Reformer Takes on Odessa

Once a top lawyer at Microsoft and now a government official in Ukraine, Sascha Borovik says politics there is like a Mexican standoff. Corrupt politicians and oligarchs point guns at each other, he says, “then we enter, unarmed, but making a lot of noise. The whole dynamic changes abruptly.” By “we” he means the team brought in by Mikheil Saakashvili, who was appointed governor of the Odessa region by President Petro Poroshenko on May 30.

As president of Georgia from 2004 to 2013, Saakashvili carried out the deepest institutional reforms seen in the former Soviet Union, cleaning up the police and liberalizing the economy. The final years of his presidency were clouded by Georgia’s defeat in its brief 2008 war with Russia as well as by criticism that he was turning toward authoritarianism. A naturalized Ukrainian, he rules a province of 2.3 million people (which includes the city as well), one of Ukraine’s most populous, criminalized, and politically unstable regions.