Yulia Tymoshenko – former Ukraine’s PM – has been arrested!
Acting on a judge’s orders, police arrested former Ukraine Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko during her abuse-of-office trial on Friday for violations of court procedures.
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Yulia Tymoshenko, the former Ukraine PM
Kiev’s court has arrested Ukraine’s ex-prime-minister Yulia Tymoshenko with the help of 30 policemen and special servicemen.
The arrest was demanded by a prosecutor over Tymoshenko’s numerous attempts to interfere in the trial.
Her supporters in court, including national lawmakers, squabbled with riot police, trying to prevent them from driving her away in a prison car and shouting:
“Shame! Shame!”
Dozens of Yulia Tymoshenko‘s supporters then gathered outside the court building in central Kiev and tried to block the road.
At the August 5th hearing she was insulting the current prime-minister Nikolay Azarov during his testimony. The charismatic Tymoshenko, the country’s top opposition leader, has criticized the trial as an attempt by President Viktor Yanukovych to bar her from elections and mocked the court.
Yulia Tymoshenko has refused to rise when addressing the court, as required, and routinely insulted the judge. Her supporters have repeatedly disrupted hearings.
Complying with the presiding judge’s orders, police surrounded Tymoshenko and escorted her out of the courtroom.
Yulia Tymoshenko is currently accused of abuse of office when signing the gas deal with Russia and can’t leave the country.
The 50-year-old opposition leader is charged with abusing her powers by signing a natural gas import contract with Russia in 2009 that prosecutors claim was disadvantageous to Ukraine.
Yulia Tymoshenko insists she is innocent, arguing that the contract ended weeks of natural gas disruptions to Ukrainian and European consumers and that she was authorized to sign the deal as prime minister.
[googlead tip=”vertical_mare”]Experts in Ukraine and abroad believe the trial’s real motive is to disqualify Yulia Tymoshenko from upcoming parliamentary and presidential elections by convicting her as a felon.
Yulia Tymoshenko has a long and bitter history with Viktor Yanukovych.
She was the central figure in Ukraine’s 2004 Orange Revolution mass protests that threw out Yanukovych’s fraud-tainted victory in a presidential election and led to another vote that brought a pro-Western government to power.
Viktor Yushchenko and Yulia Tymoshenko during Orange Revolution 2004
Yulia Tymoshenko became prime minister, but Ukrainians grew frustrated by economic hardships, slow reforms and endless bickering in the Orange camp. As a result, she lost to Kremlin-friendly Yanukovych in the 2010 presidential election.
According to her official website:
Yulia Volodymyrivna Tymoshenko was born on November 27, 1960 in Dnipropetrovsk, Ukrainian SSR (now Ukraine).
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Upon graduating from high school in 1979, she continued her education in Dnipropetrovsk State University. Her major was Economics-Cybernetics from the Department of Economics.
While being a student, she married Oleksandr Tymoshenko, in 1979 and gave birth to daughter Eugenia in 1980.
In 1984 Yulia Tymoshenko completed the university with distinction. She started to work as an engineer-economist at the Dnipropetrovsk machine-building plant, named after Lenin.