KYIV, Sept. 24 - Mikheil Saakashvili, the former Georgian president who went on to become a leading Ukrainian politician, has warned Ukraine "will continue to break up" unless the government improves the economy and reins in the scourge of corruption that has blighted the country since independence, The Telegraph reported.

Made stateless after Petro Poroshenko, Ukraine’s president, who rescinded his Ukrainian citizenship in July the 49-year-old Saakashvili made a dramatic to return to Ukraine earlier this month when a crowd of supporters broke through police lines on the Ukrainian-Polish border and swept him back into the country illegally.

Now back in his adopted home despite his lack of a Ukrainian passport he is travelling around the country, determined to be a thorn in the flesh of a government he feels has done too little to tackle corruption and improve the economy.

Without reform, he says, the government risks failing to hold a country together that has already lost control of territory to Russian-backed separatist in the east.

"If Ukraine doesn’t change it will continue to break up," he told The Telegraph. “You go to the east and you see whole cities that no longer trade with Russia and are really in a desperate situation. They don’t have any prospects and there is no light at the end of the tunnel for them.

“If you keep economic growth as it is now, if you keep corruption as it now then Ukraine is going to lose further territories in the east and the south because people will be simply fed up,” he continued.

Saakashvili also confirmed that he no longer seeks political office in Ukraine, saying that he only wanted to unite the opposition and find new political leaders.

“I don’t want any position—president or prime minister,” he said. “Doing that gives me the chance to bring the opposition together because they don’t see me as a competitor.

"I want to consolidate the opposition, and, anyway, at the moment I’m not even a citizen of Ukraine.”

His decision to spurn the calling of high-office is another twist in the story of a politician who rose to prominence on the world stage, first as a reforming Georgian leader and then as the country’s defiant president during its war with Russia in 2008.

But he suffered a dramatic fall from grace after Georgian authorities accused him of abuse-of-office charges. A wanted man back home he moved to Ukraine and became Odessa governor in 2015 before quitting, claiming Poroshenko was failing to push through the reforms needed to breathe life into an economy shackled by red-tape and corruption.

“The only chance Ukraine has is to have double-digit economic growth, and this will show the east and the south of the country, and the whole of Ukraine, that there is a future,” he told The Telegraph. “What the government is doing now is not enough.”

So far the government has appeared, publically at least, indifferent to Mr Saakashvili’s presence in Ukraine despite its efforts to keep him out of the country.

“We’ll do nothing about him. What should we do?” said Volodymyr Groysman, the Ukrainian prime minister, last week. “We’ll let society deal with these populists.” (tg/ez)