Yulia Tymoshenko
Yulia Volodimirivna Timoshenko (Ukrainian: Ю́лія Володи́мирівна Тимоше́нко; Dnipropetrovsk, November 27, 1960) is a Ukrainian politician. She was Prime Minister twice: from January 24 to September 8, 2005, and again from December 18, 2007 to March 3, 2010.
She is the leader of the Batkivshchyna (Батьківщина, Motherland) party and the Yulia Timoshenko Bloc. Previously, she was a successful businesswoman in the gas industry, so she soon became one of the richest people in Ukraine.
Before becoming prime minister, she was considered the most significant ally of opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko and was highly visible during the 2004 Ukrainian elections. She was one of the most important leaders in the Orange Revolution, the which brought Yushchenko to power. During that period, she was dubbed the "Joan of Arc of the Orange Revolution" in the media.
On March 3, 2010, she was removed from her position as prime minister by the Verkhovna Rada, in a motion of no confidence in her government. Starting in May 2010, various legal proceedings were initiated against her. On August 5, 2011, she was arrested for "repeatedly violating her ban on leaving Kiev and obstructing the investigation against her"; due to abuse of authority. According to the Court, this led to the signing of gas contracts, disadvantageous for Ukraine, with Russia in January 2009. On October 11, 2011, she was sentenced to 7 years in prison after being found guilty of the charges previously exposed.
Origins
Its origins have been the subject of various debates. His father, Vladimir Abramovich Grigyan, was born on December 3, 1937. In the Soviet passport it was written that he was a Latvian national, but he clearly had Armenian roots. Her mother, Ludmila Nikolaevna Nelepova (who will later bear the surname of her second husband, Telegin), was born on August 11, 1937 in Dnipropetrovsk. Vladimir left the family when his daughter was three years old.
Before graduating in 1977, she adopted the female version of her stepfather's surname: "Telegina." She married Oleksandr Timoshenko, the son of Soviet communist bureaucrats, in 1979, and rose to numerous ranks posts in the Soviet government system. She graduated from Dnipropetrovsk State University in 1984 with a degree in economics, and later, in November 1999, she defended her doctoral degree with a thesis entitled State regulation of the tax system. Since then she has written more than 50 academic articles.
In 1989, he founded a movie rental chain, which turned out to be successful. Encouraged by this and taking advantage of the empty regulatory background and the general post-Soviet disorder, she founded, together with her husband and her father-in-law, the Ukrainian Gasoline Corporation, which over time acquired the monopoly on the sale of fuel to the collective farms that the State had in your oblast This and subsequent operations allowed her to amass a considerable fortune between 1990 and 1998. From 1995 to 1997, Timoshenko was president of the United Energy Systems of Ukraine (YESU), a private company that has been importing Russian natural gas since 1996. This operation made the Timoshenkos became billionaires and Yulia was offered the status of an oligarch and the appellation in the international press of the 'gas princess'.
As Timoshenko grew up in a predominantly Russophone area, his native language was Russian, but when he entered politics in 1996, he decided to stop thinking in Russian and speak it as little as possible. Now, the Ukrainian language, which, as she admits, she began to speak at the age of 36 (in 1996), is her daily language; She even though she still uses Russian when she talks to her mother, who barely speaks Ukrainian.
Political career
Timoshenko entered the political world in 1996 when she was elected to represent Kirovohrad Oblast, winning with 92.3% of the vote in her district. She was re-elected in 1998 and again in 2002. In 1998, she was appointed chairperson of the Budget Committee of the Ukrainian parliament. From 1999 to 2001, Timoshenko was appointed deputy prime minister in charge of fuels in the country's energy sector, under the government of Viktor Yushchenko.
She was fired by President Leonid Kuchma in January 2001 on charges of falsifying documents and smuggling Russian natural gas during her time as president of the United Energy Systems of Ukraine between 1995 and 1997. She was arrested in February 2001 but released and the charges were dropped weeks later. When the leader of Hromada's party, of which Timoshenko was a part, Pavlo Lazarenko, fled to the United States in February 1999 to avoid investigations into embezzlement, several members of the faction left Hromada to join other parliamentary groups, including they Timoshenko.
Tymoshenko's critics have suggested that, as an oligarch, his own fortune was improperly acquired. They speculate that her familiarity with common illicit businesses in Ukraine disqualifies her from fighting corruption. Her former business associate, Ukraine's former prime minister Pavlo Lazarenko, is in extradition proceedings to Ukraine after being accused of abusing his government position for personal enrichment. In addition, Timoshenko's husband, Oleksandr, is in hiding outside Ukraine after being accused of corruption, allegedly irregularly, by the Leonid Kuchma administration. Her lawyers are believed to be preparing legal action to combat these charges.
His transition from oligarch to reformist is considered genuine and effective. Under his leadership, the industrial budget was raised by more than a thousand percent. He also eliminated the practice of bartering in the electricity market, requiring consumers to pay for their electricity in cash. His reforms translated into greater collection by the State and, thus, in the availability of more financial funds to be able to pay civil servants and increase their salaries.[citation required] On September 26, 2005, the Office of the Main Military Prosecutor of the Russian Federation withheld the passports of Yulia Tymoshenko and canceled the decision on a preventive measure in the form of detention in a case initiated in 2001 on charges of bribery of officials of the Ministry of Russian defense in 1996, when Timoshenko headed the UESU. He suffered a sharp drop in the polls when his former business associate, former Ukrainian Prime Minister Pavlo Lazarenko, was convicted on multi-billion dollar money laundering, corruption and fraud charges.
Leader of the Opposition
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In February 2001, she was arrested in Russia, but released soon after. Rumor has it that she was held by the Russian government on charges of financial crimes. After her release, Timoshenko became one of Ukraine's leading figures, attacking then-President Leonid Kuchma, whom she accused of being behind the death of Gueorgui Gongadze, an opposition journalist who had been kidnapped and assassinated in 2000.[citation needed] He founded the Yulia Timoshenko Bloc (Блок Юлії Тимошенко), a political party that received 7.2% of the vote in the 2002 Ukrainian parliamentary election.
Orange Revolution and Prime Minister
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He supported Viktor Yushchenko in the 2004 presidential campaign. Kuchma's pro-Russian government was accused of orchestrating electoral fraud in favor of his candidate Viktor Yanukovych, [citation needed] which triggered the Orange Revolution, which took place from November 2004 to January 2005. Timoshenko was one of the main leaders. As a result of the Revolution, the Supreme Court of Ukraine annulled the results of the elections, and others were called for December 2004, in which Yushchenko won the country's presidency, a position in which he was invested in January 2005, appointing Tymoshenko as Prime Minister on January 24, 2005. After protracted negotiations on the composition of the Cabinet, Yulia Timoshenko was ratified on February 4, 2005 by the Ukrainian parliament (Verkhovna Rada) with an overwhelming majority of 373 votes (with 226 votes of 'yes' required to be approved).
Following differences with Yushchenko's supporters, Timoshenko was removed from this position on September 8, 2005.
New promotion
In the parliamentary elections of March 2006, Timoshenko's coalition, along with Yushchenko's allies and the Socialist Party of Ukraine (PSU), won a majority. Tymoshenko's re-election as prime minister was expected, but the PSU betrayed the democratic coalition and unexpectedly joined the opposing Party of Regions/Communist Party coalition in exchange for top government posts. Thus, Timoshenko was forced to go into opposition, declaring the new government illegal and demanding that Yushchenko dissolve Parliament.
After Yushchenko dissolved Parliament, Timoshenko won 30% of the vote in early elections on September 30, 2007, becoming prime minister on December 18, 2007.
2010 Presidential Election
He lost the elections against his rival Víktor Yanukovych, again accusing him of fraud, this however, without his own strength. This time he said that he would not call the people to massive protests as he did when he successfully contested the 2004 elections in the Orange Revolution.
In prison
In 2011 she was arrested in the framework of a judicial process for the alleged commission of a crime of abuse of power when she was head of government; specifically, for the signing of a gas purchase contract from Russia in 2009. Supporters of the then president, Viktor Yanukovych, argued that the contract went against Ukrainian interests due to the high price at which the gas was purchased. Timoshenko denied having committed an abuse of power and stressed that the trial was political revenge by President Yanukovych, who was trying to neutralize her politically ahead of the October 2012 parliamentary elections.
The trial against Timoshenko was marked in the first weeks by the crossing of accusations between the former prime minister and the court, which the Ukrainian opposition accused of being a "puppet" of President Yanukovych. In August, the court ordered Tymoshenko's detention for contempt, sparking protests by hundreds of her supporters, who rallied for days outside the courthouse in central Kiev. The former prime minister's lawyers asked the appeals court for the release of her client on the grounds that her detention was "illegal", but judge Olga Yesímova rejected it. Tymoshenko's lawyer, Yuri Sukhov, publicly called the decision "strange": it does not seem that lawyers have the right to challenge an arrest; this is democracy in Ukraine , he said.
Both the United States and the member countries of the European Union asked the Ukrainian authorities to release Tymoshenko, while the president (Yanukovich) assured that he would not intervene in the judicial process against the opposition leader.
On Tuesday, October 11, 2011, former Ukrainian opposition leader and prime minister Yulia Timoshenko was sentenced to seven years in prison after being found guilty of abuse of power. Likewise, she was disqualified from holding public office for three years, as requested by the Prosecutor's Office, so that theoretically she could not participate in the following parliamentary and presidential elections.
On April 20, 2012, she began a hunger strike (she said she had been mistreated by a guard and shared photos with bruises on her belly) that ended on May 9 when they assured her that she would be treated by a German doctor.
International protests
Several international instances condemned the way she was being treated by the Ukrainian authorities. Thus Ukraine was forced to suspend a summit of Eastern and Central European countries that was to be held from May 10 to 12 in Yalta, after 14 of the 18 invited leaders refused to attend the event.
Likewise, some of the countries that participated in Euro 2012, such as Great Britain, Germany, France and Spain, did not send official representation to the matches that their soccer teams played in Ukraine, as a sign of protest against the situation of Yulia Timoshenko, although they did when they played in Poland (like the German chancellor Angela Merkel or the president of the Spanish government Mariano Rajoy or the princes of Asturias).
Euromaidan and liberation
On February 22, 2014, the government of Victor Yanukovych was overthrown and Timoshenko was released after the success of Ukraine's second revolution in a decade. In her first public appearance, Timoshenko announced her candidacy for the upcoming presidential election.
In a telephone conversation held on March 18, leaked by the Russian secret services and reported by Russian state television RT, Timoshenko reportedly threatened to kill the eight million Russians living in Ukraine. He later confirmed the authenticity of the recording, but denied threatening the Russians and claimed that the recording was redacted. Some observers believe that the leak "serves Moscow's interests in fanning separatist flames in Ukraine, especially in the southeast." », although there has also been speculation that Tymoshenko's popularity could have increased among the electorate of western Ukraine for the presidential elections on May 25.