Craning Over Ukraine

 

By Mark Howell

 

A couple of years ago, in another column, we wrote about a young Ukrainian woman named Yulia Volodymyrivna Tymoshenko who today is the leader of the All-Ukrainian Union political party.

 

 

When we first wrote about Yulia, she had just finished second in the Ukrainian presidential election, been arrested on charges of embezzlement and abuse of power and sentenced to seven years in prison, where she claimed she herself was physically abused.

 

 

The update on Yulia is that she was released after the Ukraine Supreme Court found that “no crime was committed.”

 

 

Her story continues to make for one heck of a Ukrainian tale. Before her political career she’d been a successful businesswoman in the gas industry, becoming one of the richest people in her country and placing third on Forbes Magazine's list of the world's most powerful women.

 

 

Born in 1960 in what was then called Soviet Ukraine, she was abandoned by her father when 3 years old. Thirty-nine years later she was awarded a PhD on “state regulation of the tax system” at Kiev University.

 

 

In 1991, Yulia established with her husband, Oleksandr Tymoshenko, the Ukrainian Petrol Corporation. In May 2004, allegations of money laundering and conspiracy against the Tymoshenkos were dismissed and Yulia was able to claim that, under her management, the company had been able to pay off Ukraine’s multi-billion debt to Russia for natural gas.

 

 

From December 1999 to January 2001, Tymoshenko served as her country’s Deputy Prime Minister for the fuel and energy sector. Later in 2001, she was arrested again and charged with forging customs documents and smuggling gas while president of United Energy Systems of Ukraine. Her political supporters organized protest rallies. On April 9, 2003, the Kiev Court of Appeal issued a ruling that invalidated and cancelled proceedings on the criminal cases against Yulia and her husband.

 

 

In January 2002, Tymoshenko survived a mysterious car accident that many believe to have been a government assassination attempt.

 

 

By 2004, her political popularity had grown to such a degree that Yulia began to be called the “Ukrainian Joan of Arc” and the “Princess Leia of Ukrainian politics.”

 

 

On Jan. 24, 2005, Yulia was appointed acting Prime Minister of Ukraine. She announced a program of support payments for all women following the birth of a child and there followed an immediate increase in the birth rate in Ukraine.

 

 

Several months into her government, internal conflicts within her coalition began to damage her administration. Yulia’s government was soon dismissed by Ukraine’s president in a live TV address to the nation.

 

 

In 2006, Yulia announced that her political force and following would stand in opposition to the new government. In 2007, She traveled to the United States, where she held meetings with Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Stephen Hadley, the National Security Advisor under President George W. Bush.

 

 

In 2007, Yulia and Russian Premier Vladimir Putin announced that they found it comfortable to work together. Also in 2007, Yulia’s party, the Tymoshenko Bloc, agreed to form a majority coalition government with the Ukraine–People’s Self-Defense Bloc.

 

 

Yulia and German Chancellor Angela Merkel met at a 2011European People's Party summit in Brussels after the General Prosecutor of Ukraine lifted a travel ban imposed on Yulia for corruption charges; she was officially invited to this event by Sen. John McCain.

 

 

Since May 2010, a number of new criminal cases had been brought against Yulia on charges of abuse of power and embezzlement in her natural gas deals with Russia.

 

 

Yulia was re-arrested in December 2011on charges of tax evasion sent to a penal colony in rural Ukraine.

 

 

In 2012, her husband Oleksandr was granted asylum in the Czech Republic.

 

 

Also in 2012, the General Ukraine’s Prosecutor's Office began examining the possible involvement of Yulia and her husband in the murder of Donetsk businessman Olexandr Momot in 1996. She insisted the corpse had been found in a place deliberately to incriminate her and her husband.

 

 

During a March 2014 press conference in Kiev, Yulia announced she would run in the presidential election. Two days later, the Congress of Batkivshchyna party officially nominated her.'

 

 

On March 7 of this year, she was admitted to the Charité hospital in Berlin, Germany, for treatment of severe back problems.

 

 

The latest words from Yulia are these: In a recording of a leaked phone conversation with Nestor Shufrych, former deputy secretary of the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine, she appeared to say in reference to the reunification of Crimea with Russia, “This is really beyond all boundaries. It’s about time we grab our guns and go kill those damn Russians together with their leader and nuke the eight million Russians who are now exiles in Ukraine.”

 

 

 

In a statement, while admitting she had spoken to Shufrych on the telephone, Yulia denied having advocated the use of nuclear bombs against ethnic Russians in Ukraine and avowed that the recording had been deliberately edited to discredit her.

 

 

Stay tuned.

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