Former Ukranian PM complains of ‘revenge’

Former Ukrainian prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko said yesterday authorities had told her they planned to discharge her from hospital and send her back to prison – a move she said amounted to “another act of
revenge”.

However, the prison service, which said last week it planned to ask the former premier’s doctors whether she needed further treatment, denied it had handed her any such notification.

Opposition leader Tymoshenko, 51, was sentenced to seven years in jail last year after being found guilty of abusing her authority when prime minister in a case the west condemned as an example of politically-motivated selective justice.

However, in May, she was moved from her prison in the city of Kharkiv to a local state-run hospital for treatment for back trouble.

If she is sent back to prison ahead of a parliamentary election on 28 October, opposition parties hoping to defeat president Viktor Yanukovich’s Party of the Regions, would be likely to try to make political capital out of it.

Mr Yanukovich’s party has a majority in parliament.

“The prison service has handed me a paper giving me notice that [my] treatment is being stopped and that I will be discharged in yet another act of revenge,” Tymoshenko said in a Batkivshchyna (Fatherland) party statement.