The Times Magazine 9mother. She was married at 18. Her daughter,
Yevhenia (who was educated at Rugby School
and the London School of Economics),
was born barely a year later. Despite that,
Tymoshenko managed to earn a first-class
degree in engineering and economics from
Dnipropetrovsk State University.
In the final years of the Soviet Union,
in the late Eighties, she and her husband,
Oleksandr, took advantage of President
Gorbachev’s perestroika reforms to set up
a video rental business in Dnipropetrovsk.
Following the Soviet Union’s collapse,
when cowboy capitalism ran amok and
proper controls were virtually nonexistent,
they parlayed that initial business venture
first into the Ukrainian Petrol Corporation,
which supplied farmers with diesel, and
then into United Energy Systems of Ukraine
(UESU), which became the country’s biggest
importer of Russian gas. In somewhat
opaque circumstances Tymoshenko grew
immensely rich. She was dubbed the
“gas princess”.In 1996 she entered politics and was
elected to the Ukrainian parliament. In 1999
she founded her own left-leaning party,
Batkivshchyna. That same year she was
appointed deputy prime minister of fuel and
energy and set about tackling that sector’s
endemic corruption until she was herself
accused of corruption in 2001. She was held
for 24 days before the charges were dropped.
She claimed her arrest was politically
motivated and became a fierce opponent of
the president at the time, Leonid Kuchma.
In 2002, Tymoshenko survived a mysterious
car accident in Kyiv that may or may not have
been an assassination attempt by Kuchma’s
supporters. Then, in 2004, she gained global
prominence through her leadership of
Ukraine’s so-called Orange Revolution.
Kuchma rigged that November’s
presidential elections to ensure that his
handpicked pro-Russian candidate, Viktor
Yanukovych, defeated his western-orientated
rival, Viktor Yushchenko, who was
mysteriously poisoned – and seriously
disfigured – during the campaign.
When the result was announced,
demonstrations erupted across Ukraine.
As many as 500,000 people packed into
Kyiv’s Maidan Nezalezhnosti (Independence
Square). Day after day, as the world’s media
bore witness, Tymoshenko delivered fiery
speeches and galvanised the protests until
the Supreme Court ordered a fresh election.
The second time round, Yushchenko won
comfortably and appointed his ally to be
Ukraine’s first woman prime minister.
Uniting against a common enemy was easy.
Governing together proved less so. Withinmonths Yushchenko and Tymoshenko fell
out and he sacked her. In opposition once
more, Tymoshenko adopted a nationalist,
pro-European, anti-Russian platform. At some
point she switched from speaking Russian
to Ukrainian. Batkivshchyna performed well
in the parliamentary elections of 2007 and
Yushchenko was obliged to restore her to the
post of prime minister.
Her rehabilitation proved a proverbial
poisoned chalice. She and Yushchenko
continued to squabble. In 2008 Ukraine was hit
hard by the global financial crisis. In January
2009 Russia cut off gas supplies to Ukraine,
and by extension to Europe, for 13 days over
allegedly unpaid bills. Tymoshenko had to
negotiate a new contract personally with Putin.
Asked how she got on with Putin,
Tymoshenko says their meetings were
characterised by formality and distrust.
“Ukraine was always under pressure from
Russia and being blackmailed by Russia,” she
says. “That was an energy war. Now we’re in a
full-blown war.” For his part, Putin was said to
have described Tymoshenko as “the only man
in the Ukraine government”, and paid her the
backhanded compliment of turning up on time.
In 2010 she ran against Yanukovych for
the presidency, but by then her popularity was
waning. She lost. The following year she was
charged with abuse of power and sentenced
to seven years’ imprisonment. She claimed
the charges were fabricated by Yanukovych
to silence her. The Obama administration
and the European Union protested against
her incarceration, but to no avail.
Years later it transpired that Paul Manafort,
Donald Trump’s presidential campaignWith Viktor Yushchenko at a political rally, 2004
With her husband, Oleksandr, 2019
Visiting bomb-damaged Chernihiv earlier this month