"Landep News"
Ukraine - Freedom
The sentencing of Ukrainian former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko to seven years in jail for abuse of office in concluding a deal with the Russian Gazprom in 2009 was intensely criticized by both Western countries and by the Russians.
The Western media and political leaders said that since he took office in 2010, president Yanukovych attempted to at least make believe that he was leading the country into the right direction, toward Europe, but that the condemnation of Tymoshenko is definitely a step backwards.
In spite of the efforts made by Poland, which holds the rotating presidency of the European Union to dissociate the Tymoshenko trial from the Ukrainian bid for European membership, the leaders of the continental body warned the president of Ukraine that the future of Ukraine in Europe is deeply linked to the outcome of the trial in which the former PM is believed by the EU leaders to have been dragged for political reasons only, though the trial and the testimony of former allies Tymoshenko had during the Orange Revolution show that there could also be an economic layer that contributed to the sentenced passed on Tuesday by the 31-year-old judge in Kyiv.
Tymoshenko continued to defy the court on Tuesday, as she had done since the beginning of the trial, which got her held in contempt of court for the past two months as the judge read the verdict and affirmed that she had “criminally” exceeded her powers in 2009.
Very angry, Tymoshenko deemed the trial as comparable to one in the times of Josef Stalin, and urged the people to join her in overthrowing the dictatorship that got control over the country.
She reiterated that the sentence was not pronounced by president Kireyev but by president Viktor Yanukovych. Yanukovych did not comment on the sentence anything more than that she had the appeal possibility, reminding that Ukraine works like all countries, on the division of powers, while people in Ukraine vowed to protest until she was released from prison.
Since no one in the world is willing to give any credit to the judicial system in Ukraine, and all have already convicted it of acting as a political tool since the beginning, it is up to the European leaders to decide whether to sign or not the trade agreement with Ukraine, which would officially open negotiations for admission to EU.
What is almost funny is that the decision also angered the Russians, who, according to Tymoshenko’s supporters, are supposed to be the beneficiary of this trial, which would put an end to the European aspirations of Ukraine, and would push it toward Moscow’s Eurasian Union Putin is building.
Vladimir Putin, the prime minister of the Russian Federation, said he was bewildered by the sentence, and added that he could not understand why she got these years in prison. He added that the sentence showed its “anti-Russian character,” without specifying why, since Tymoshenko is construed as the champion of “anti-Russian and pro-Western” attitude herself.
As solutions are being negotiated to solve the problem, one of them was the decriminalizing of the article under which she was convicted. In other words, in order for Mrs Tymoshenko to have her name cleared and to be able to run in the next year’s elections Ukraine should consider that the abuse of power is no longer a criminal offence. How European can such a provision be?
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