Misha’s moment

THE new governor of Odessa in southern Ukraine has many useful attributes. He once implemented a boldly successful anti-corruption campaign, sacking all the traffic police. That is valuable experience in a region that, even in a country as crooked as Ukraine, is renowned for graft. He speaks numerous languages, a plus in a polyglot maritime area. As an out-of-towner, he is not implicated in the oligarchic in-fighting that blights Odessa and much of Ukraine.

The oddity (and perhaps problem) is that the new governor, Mikheil Saakashvili, is not just any out-of-towner. He is a former president of Georgia, on the other side of the Black Sea—although, after leaving office in 2013, he faces allegations of abuse of office (which he denies) and cannot safely return. Mr Saakashvili led the “rose revolution” of 2003 and tried to steer Georgia towards membership of the European Union and NATO—a strategy that led Russia’s Vladimir Putin into a war with his small Caucasian neighbour in 2008. As with Ukraine after the orange revolution of 2004, Georgia’s fitful progress westward was hampered by the Kremlin’s determination to keep it in Russia’s orbit.