The 'samurai in a skirt' fights on

By Tom Parfitt
THE GUARIDAN , LONDON
Sunday, Feb 05, 2006, Page 18

Former Ukrainian prime minister Yulia Timoshenko has fought many battles. She remains defiant and is a constant critic of her erstwhile political ally President Viktor Yushchenko. PHOTO: EPA

Their tilted so close together that they brush at the temple, the couple seem a picture of harmony and understanding. His face is strangely pockmarked, hers drawn yet beautiful, but both are smiling with quiet contentment.

The iconic image of Ukraine's opposition leader, Viktor Yushchenko, and his ally, Yulia Timoshenko, on stage in Kiev appeared in newspapers across the world. It is a reminder of happier times: the orange revolution last winter that propelled Yushchenko to the presidency.

A rigged presidential election had sparked a popular uprising that quickly saw the capital's Independence Square crammed with chanting protesters. For more than a month, international attention was locked on Ukraine and on the "dream team" of Yushchenko and Timoshenko, who promised a sparkling future out of the clutches of a corrupt, Soviet-style regime.

Yushchenko, the shy but respected former banker whose face was crumpled by an alleged poisoning attempt, provided the gravitas.

Timoshenko the glamorous firebrand who loosed off tirades of rhetoric and called her supporters to the barricades.

"From the very first moment that the president came to power, people from his closest circle made an enemy figure out of me."

Yulia Timoshenko, former prime minister and so-called "gas princess" of Ukraine

And the end, the fairy tale came true. The arch-villain of the piece, pro-Russian prime minister Viktor Yanukovich, was ushered from the stage and Yushchenko took the presidency. Within weeks he named his spirited sidekick as prime minister.

Then trouble began. The economy began to nosedive and rifts opened between the orange leaders.

"From the very first moment that the president came to power, people from his closest circle made an enemy figure out of me," claimed Timoshenko, in an interview at her party headquarters in central Kiev.

When she was sacked as premier with the rest of her cabinet last September, after a welter of corruption allegations between Yushchenko's aides and ministers spilled into the open, she turned on her former ally, accusing him of "ruining our unity, our future, the future of our country."

Petite startlingly good-looking, the 45-year-old former businesswoman retains her fearsome reputation -- her latest moniker in the Ukrainian press is "the samurai in a skirt."

Approaching end of a 16-hour working day, she is dressed in an immaculate pinstripe trouser suit and a pleated white blouse.

"I was not fired for some kind of action that was ineffective in my role as head of the government, but to close off the subject of this shameful corruption within the president's circle," she said.

Since her dismissal she has kept up a constant stream of criti-cism of Yushchenko, calling Kiev's recent deal with Moscow over the gas crisis "a complete betrayal."

In Ukraine, the split between the orange leaders has led to widespread disillusionment with their vows to throw off the corrupt old ways that thrived under former president Leonid Kuchma.

"Yushchenko came off very badly because people see him and Timoshenko as a quarrelling couple and they think he, as the man, should be patching things up," said Denys Bohush, a former campaign spin doctor for Yushchenko.

Timoshenko the breakup was "a great mistake" and the "biggest moral trauma of my life," but is convinced the ideals of the orange revolution can still be salvaged. "My political aim, in fact, is very simple -- I would like to work a miracle and realize what was promised at the time of Yushchenko's election. I want Ukraine to stop being a country of clans."

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 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 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 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 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 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.