8 The Times Magazineot for one moment, after Russia
invaded Ukraine on February 24,
did Yulia Tymoshenko think of
leaving her homeland. “We didn’t
know how it would go, but on the
first day of the war me and my
team decided we would stay in
Ukraine and with Ukraine, and in
no circumstances were we going to
leave Ukraine. Nothing was going
to change that decision,” says the former
prime minister – she of the famous plaited
golden hair.
Tymoshenko is also renowned for her
ambition, but she immediately told members
of her opposition party, Batkivshchyna
(Fatherland), “Politics has ended in Ukraine.
There’s no more government and opposition.
From this minute we are supporting our
president, our government and our armed
forces with every effort we can.”
Although she had been defeated by
Volodymyr Zelensky in the 2019 presidential
election and had since opposed almost all his
policies, she informed him that “we are one
team and whatever services he needs we are
ready to provide”.
Tymoshenko has been as good as her
word. She has worked to evacuate sick
children. She has helped supply food and
medicine to frontline towns and cities. She has
called western leaders to appeal for support.
And she has travelled to what she calls the
“hotspots”, to towns and cities that have
become almost household names in the
West thanks to Russia’s war crimes: Kharkiv,
Donetsk, Chernihiv, Bucha, Irpin, Borodyanka.
What she has witnessed has caused her
“huge pain”, she tells me from her office in
Kyiv. “What I have seen with my own eyes is
breaking my heart for ever,” she says through
an interpreter who also happens to be the first
deputy chairman of the Ukraine parliament’s
foreign affairs committee. “Nobody can go
through this without tears.”
She talks sadly and sombrely of parents
who had to watch Russian soldiers raping their
young daughter; of seeing stray dogs gnawing
at the abandoned corpses of Russian soldiers;
of hurriedly dug graves outside ruined homes
and apartment blocks; and of children having
to spend weeks at a time in dimly lit shelters
with little food.
Visiting a military hospital near Kharkiv,
she saw the shattered case of an artillery shell
on the director’s desk. She asked if a wounded
soldier had given it to him as a souvenir.
“Look behind me,” he replied, showing her a
large hole in the wall behind the desk. “This
is part of an artillery shell that came without
invitation into my office.”
But she also speaks of her immense pride
in her fellow Ukrainians. “I have witnessed
the massive heroism of ordinary people,” shesays. The armed forces are fighting heroically
on the front lines. Other men are protecting
their communities as volunteers in territorial
defence units. Students are making petrol
bombs. “Every Ukrainian has chosen to fight
on their own front line, beginning with the
first missile.”
Never one to mince her words,
Tymoshenko accuses Russia’s president,
Vladimir Putin, a man she knows well, of
“the conscious, planned genocide of Ukraine”.
She says he is waging a “full-blooded, dark,
rational and calculated war” in order to build
a new Russian empire, and “wants to erase
formally our identity, our history and our
culture because for him Russians and
Ukrainians are one people”. It is, she adds,
“difficult to comprehend that what we see in
front of us is happening in the 21st century
in Europe”.
For the West, too, she has some harsh
words. Ukraine is paying the price for its
feeble response to Putin’s previous acts of
aggression, she says. She is grateful for thesanctions it has now imposed on Russia, but
they are not enough. The free world has to
end its “policies of appeasement”. It must stop
believing it can work with Russia, stop buying
Russian energy, stop fearing Russian weapons
of mass destruction and seize this chance to
destroy Putin’s regime.
“We have a unique historical moment to
kill and finish this absolute evil once and for
ever,” she declares.Tymoshenko, now 61, may be glamorous but
she is also tough. In a remarkable career she
has made a fortune and survived revolution,
imprisonment by two different presidents, a
suspected assassination attempt, hunger strikes,
smear campaigns, the enmity of the Kremlin
and the vertiginous troughs and peaks of
Ukraine’s treacherous brand of politics.
Born in the industrial city of
Dnipropetrovsk, now Dnipro, in the Russian-
speaking east of Ukraine, in what was then
the USSR, she was abandoned by her father
before she was three and raised by a singleN
‘WHAT I HAVE SEEN BREAKS MY HEART. NOBODY
CAN GO THROUGH THIS WITHOUT TEARS’
With Putin in Chisinau,
Moldova, 2008PREVIOUS SPREAD: ALEXEY NIKOLSKY/AFP/GETTY IMAGES. THIS SPREAD: ALEXEY NIKOLSKY/AFP/GETTY IMAGES, GETTY IMAGES, PA