She does not rule out a reconciliation with Yushchenko, but insists he must first shed the oligarchs and advisers who she claims have manipulated him and ensured his "complete disorientation."
"All the time a feeling was being stirred up in the president that I was his main competitor in political life," she said. "But that was not true. We complemented each other politically ... Our efforts were so harmoniously shared out that we could have worked as a team for decades, without being competitors. Unfortunately, that did not figure in the plans of those people who saw Ukraine as a closed business for the creation of their own shadow profits, for the creation of a powerful system to earn money."
"Many new faces have come to power, but the face of power has not changed," Yushchenko famously said, grumbling that Timoshenko had concentrated on self-aggrandizement.
Asked whether she is hurt by attempts to discredit her, she replied: "Well, Christ was crucified. As a normal, earthly person, if you want to reach the end of a difficult road then you can only do it by going though ordeals that seem insurmountable."
Yulia Grigyan was born in 1960 in the eastern city of Dnepropetrovsk. She was an only child brought up alone by her mother in a cramped flat. After leaving school in 1979 she studied cybernetic engineering at the local university. That year she met Oleksandr Timoshenko, the son of a bureaucrat. The couple married and their daughter, Yevgenia, was born a year later.
Using borrowed money, the couple set up a shop renting out pirated videos made on two recorders in their living room. The shop soon became a chain. Later they began trading in oil and metals and in the mid-1990s Timoshenko became president of United Energy Systems of Ukraine (UESU), a private company that took advantage of the country's energy crisis.
Timoshenko became extremely wealthy, earning the nickname "the gas princess" and reportedly flying in a fleet of private jets. She sent her daughter to the London School of Economics. All seemed well, but when former prime minister Pavlo Lazarenko fled to the US and was arrested there for money laundering and embezzling vast sums of money during his time in office, Timoshenko was named as an associate in the indictment.
The US authorities did not pursue her. However, in summer 2000 her husband was detained by Ukrainian police and charged with fraud, an accusation that was later dropped. Six months later, Timoshenko, who had by then entered politics as a fierce critic of former president Kuchma, was sacked from her post of deputy prime minister and later arrested for alleged fraud, smuggling and tax evasion. Prosecutors claimed that as head of UESU she had funnelled more than US$1 billion abroad.
She spent six weeks in prison awaiting trial before a court ordered her release.
Timoshenko refused to talk about her personal fortune but insists her business dealings were "absolutely legal" and that the charges were politically motivated. It is generally acknowledged that her campaign to root out corruption as deputy premier returned about US$2 billion to state coffers and provoked the fury of oligarchs close to Kuchma.
Out of jail, Timoshenko finally threw in her lot with Yushchenko in his race for the presidency against Yanukovich, a Kuchma protege whose attempts to fiddle the vote prompted the orange revolution.
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