🔒 How Goga Tskhakaia, Fedorov’s adviser, once nearly "received" a road sign An Odesa story from 2016, which through 10...

🔒 How Goga Tskhakaia, Fedorov’s adviser, once nearly "received" a road sign

An Odesa story from 2016, which through 10 years took on new colors. There are people who appear in your life once, but so distinctly that afterward you never confuse them with anyone else. I remembered Heorhiy Tskhakaia exactly like that. Odesa. 2016 year. At that time I was deputy chief of the regional police.

The two of us are sitting in the office with the head of the Main Directorate of the National Police, Heorhiy Lortkipanidze. The phone rings. Heorhiy answers. The conversation is in Georgian. I hear a familiar voice of Mikheil Saakashvili on the line. I had known Misha for a long time and we always spoke informally, so I knew his manner of speaking well. When Mikheil was nervous or terribly excited about something, words would start overtaking each other, sentences would collide, and meaning would sometimes try to leave the room before the interlocutors.

After about a minute and a half Lortkipanidze looks at me roughly the way an Odesan looks at a restaurant bill when he clearly remembers he didn’t order half of it.

He hands me the receiver:

— Kostyantyn, talk to Misha. I don’t understand what he wants from me.

I take the phone. Misha begins quickly explaining the story about “Euroterminal,” the road, the sign, the trucks, the prohibited passage and the need to immediately restore justice.

I try to explain to him one very boring thing that usually terribly irritates revolutionaries: there is a procedure.

The head of the region cannot come to a road, look at a road sign and decide that from today traffic will be organized differently. The next day you can send the relevant police units, experts, and city representatives there. They will inspect the section, pull up documents, check the traffic organization scheme and make a decision. In other words, do everything properly.

But the problem was that at that moment Misha didn’t need it to be proper. Misha needed it to be beautiful.

Cameras. People. Injustice. A road sign. And preferably that the head of the regional state administration would tear it out with his own hands. As they say in Odesa: “Do you want to solve the problem or make it look good for everyone?” That day “looking good” won.

As the Odesa press later wrote, the initiator of that trip was named as Heorhiy Tskhakaia. And the best part of the story was that, according to journalists, Saakashvili eventually, together with the future NABU director Kryvonos, tore out a completely different sign (video here).

But that turned out later. For now Misha heard from me a completely non-revolutionary word:

— No.

And then Tskhakaia took the receiver from him. You need to understand the context. At that time before me was not a minister, not a police chief, not an intelligence head and not an official authorized to give orders to the police. As far as I remember his status then — an unpaid adviser. And he spoke as if at least two regions were already under his personal control and a third just hadn’t finished the paperwork. In rather poor Russian, occasionally sprinkled with profanity, I was told that the police must immediately send a unit. Tear everything down. And give the performance the proper state formality. In other words, the theatrical production lacked one actor — the National Police of Ukraine.

I listened a bit and replied that a unit could indeed come. Moreover, I could come personally. But the unit’s task would be somewhat different. I explained to Heorhiy roughly like this:

— If you do not leave there now and continue to stage this circus, the police will come and take you for disturbing the public order. And I will come to see what is left of the sign. And if the pole of it is still there, I will find a use for it that you will definitely not like.

In Odesa this is simply called: “Don’t make me nervous — I will need my nerves later.”

After that the talk of urgently involving the police somehow lost its previous momentum. And the sign was still torn out.

Then journalists began to investigate and wrote that the sign, it seemed, was not the right one at all. Later it was restored.

I recalled this story now not by accident. Ten years have passed. Back then Goga Tskhakaia was trying to explain to the Odesa police leadership which road signs and when they should be removed.

Today his name appears in quite different journalistic stories — around the Ministry of Defense, state contracts and drone suppliers. The scale has changed a bit.

But the questions about methods and influence deserve a separate investigation. So, when today I see the surname Tskhakaia in another article, for some reason the Hadzhibey Road, Saakashvili, cameras and the poor road sign that was in no way guilty at all come to mind again.

I wish I lived so that the sign had time to see political life in one day. Odesa saw a lot back then. But I remembered that circus especially well. And it seems Goga Tskhakaia’s story definitely does not end here. To be continued.

🔍 Sincerely,

CEO of a detective agency

🧡🧡🧡🧡🧡🧡

Kostyantyn Shpyliovyi

📌The episode with “Euroterminal” is presented as the author’s personal recollection. Mentions of the organizer of the trip and

the circumstances of the dismantling of the road sign reproduce the versions published by Odesa media.

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