The husband of former Ukrainian prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko has been granted asylum in the Czech Republic, a week after his wife was transferred to a penal colony to serve a seven-year sentence.
Yulia Tymoshenko, 51, was convicted in October of abuse of office for signing an allegedly disadvantageous gas deal with Russia in 2009. She lost an appeal last month. Critics say the prosecution was politically motivated and probably ordered by her rival, Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, who denies that accusation.
The Czech interior ministry confirmed on Friday it had approved the application for asylum submitted by Tymoshenko’s partner, Oleksandr, a businessman.
Batkivshchina, the political party led by Tymoshenko, issued a statement on Thursday saying: “This step by Oleksander Tymoshenko is the response to amoral attempts to torture and put pressure on Yulia Tymoshenko by persecuting her relatives and people close to her.”
Natasha Lysova, Tymoshenko’s spokeswoman, told the Guardian by telephone from Kiev that the politician’s husband had not suffered direct persecution, but he feared authorities might harass him to silence his wife.
“Anything is possible with this regime,” Lysova said. “Their illegal terror campaign against Yulia Tymoshenko is a deliberate attempt to destroy her as Yanukovych’s main political opponent at elections.”
Ukraine will hold a parliamentary vote in October and a presidential poll in 2015.
Tymoshenko was one of the leaders of the 2004 Orange Revolution, which saw hundreds of thousands of demonstrators take to the streets of Kiev in protest at a rigged presidential election. Yanukovych lost the rerun to Tymoshenko’s ally, former Ukrainian president Viktor Yushchenko, but he preserved solid support in the Russian-speaking east of the country. He then capitalized on divisions in the orange camp to seize the presidency in 2010, although Tymoshenko came a narrow second.
The US and EU called the Tymoshenko trial an example of “selective justice” and the EU has stalled on a political association and free trade agreement with Ukraine over the case.
Yulia Tymoshenko was transferred from a detention center in Kiev to the Kachaniv women’s prison colony in Kharkiv, eastern Ukraine, on Dec. 30.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema