Elena Patyaeva—a friend of Seda Suleymanova, who disappeared three years ago after being forcibly returned from St. Petersburg to Chechnya—was detained in Grozny. On August 23, Patyaeva stood by the monument to journalists who died for freedom of speech, holding a sign that read: "I demand an investigation into the murder of Seda Suleymanova." This was reported by the human rights project "Slovo Zashchite" (Word for the Defense).
According to ex-President of Georgia Mikheil Saakashvili, they want to transfer him to the Rustavi prison because there, in conditions of limited medical attention, there is a high probability of a sharp deterioration in his condition. He wrote about this on social networks, responding to the demand of ex-Prime Minister Giorgi Gakharia’s party “For Georgia” to return him to prison from the clinic.
“I spend more than a year in an oxygen-free space, in which there is no sunlight and in which it is impossible to walk. Here I have extremely limited contacts, and the only person I can see regularly is my mother, who brings me food after I was diagnosed with heavy metal poisoning in prison,” Saakashvili said. According to him, the authors of the appeal want to deprive him of the opportunity to communicate with voters. However, Saakashvili can do this in court.
Since his arrest on October 1, 2021, Mikheil Saakashvili has spent a total of less than six months in a prison cell. The rest of the time he was in clinics: first in a prison, then in a military hospital, and from May 2022 in the Vivamedi clinic.