Fiery Opposition Leader Keeps the Heat on Ukraine’s Regime

Tensions over disputed presidential balloting were at a peak when Yulia Tymoshenko, the fiery second-in-command of Ukraine’s opposition movement, stepped to the microphone of an outdoor stage during a rally early this month.

The crowd of about 150,000 had gathered to back opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko’s bid for the presidency. Tymoshenko’s job was to keep the protesters’ spirits up and their determination strong after the declaration of Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovich as winner of the November election.

Speaking to the crowd, she warned President Leonid D. Kuchma that if he did not yield to opposition demands, his activities would be viewed as “a crime against his own people.” She called for protesters to mass the next day outside the Supreme Court as it considered the opposition’s allegation that fraud had invalidated Yanukovich’s victory -- a position the court later accepted, setting a rematch for the day after Christmas.

In this battle for Ukraine’s future, Yushchenko and Tymoshenko are playing a good-cop, bad-cop routine. Yushchenko, 50, often appears the calm statesman, accepting compromise when it furthers his goals and speaking in recent days about details of the economic policy he would implement.

Tymoshenko, 44, her hair usually braided and wound in a bun on her head in a traditional Ukrainian peasant style, focuses more on emotions. Issuing threats to authorities and warning against complacency, she reminds supporters that a lot can still go wrong for the opposition and fires up the troops. At the same time, she makes no secret of her hope to be prime minister under Yushchenko.

Early in the crisis, television footage showed a telling episode. Tymoshenko was seen conferring with Yushchenko in parliament, then dashing outside, where she helped a demonstrator climb over a barrier. A number of protesters then tried to storm into parliament, a few making it through the door and into the lobby. There, opposition leaders, including Yushchenko, urged them to retreat. Security guards were then able to push the doors back shut again.

It was never clear in that incident whether Tymoshenko and Yushchenko disagreed over what to do or were staging a show of confrontation and then compromise. But the effect was to display Yushchenko in the peacemaker’s role.

The differences between Tymoshenko and Yushchenko sometimes appear very real, although in the nature of disputes between friends. When parliament agreed Dec. 8 to a compromise package of laws strengthening safeguards against electoral fraud while weakening presidential powers, Yushchenko treated it as a major victory that virtually guaranteed him the presidency.

But Tymoshenko grumbled for days that the opposition had been in such a strong position, there had been no need to trade away the future president’s powers in order to ensure an honest election. She warned that members of the political elite associated with Kuchma could remain dominant by bribing members of parliament to do their bidding.

“This is not the kind of political reform that the people of Ukraine need,” she declared at a news conference. “Imagine April 1945, when Hitler had lost his campaign. Some people were preparing drugs to kill themselves. Hitler was preparing a gun. Then [imagine if] Churchill and Stalin came and said: ‘You’ll keep everything you have. You have guarantees and amnesty. Just fix your Nazi legislation a bit.’ This isn’t the way it should be done.”

Although critical of Yushchenko’s willingness to compromise, her scenario creates a contrast with Kuchma’s faction that is favorable to the opposition leader.

A few years ago, Yushchenko and Tymoshenko had a very different partnership: He was prime minister from 1999 to 2001, and she served as a deputy prime minister responsible for energy issues. She fell out with Kuchma sooner than Yushchenko did, and thus has spent more time than him as an opposition leader.

Tymoshenko first gained prominence as the “gas princess,” a businesswoman who maneuvered skillfully in Ukraine’s chaotic, corrupt business world after the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union. Her company, United Energy Systems, became one of the largest corporations in mid-1990s Ukraine. Her supporters say that as deputy prime minister, she used her knowledge of scams common in the energy business to crack down on corruption and boost tax collection.

Kuchma ordered her fired from that post in January 2001, shortly after her indictment on charges of smuggling, forgery and tax evasion dating to 1996, when she headed UES. She charged that the accusations were inspired by powerful supporters of Kuchma to end her efforts to root out corruption.

She was briefly detained in 2001, and prosecutors continue to investigate her and her husband, Oleksandr Tymoshenko, who was an officer with the company.

Estimates of her personal worth at the time ran into the hundreds of millions of dollars, but she says all her wealth is now gone.

Her website says her company was destroyed and “political” charges were pressed against its officers “by order of President Kuchma, who was maniacally afraid of anything that he could not take under his control.”

She also has faced legal charges in Russia, which has strongly backed Yanukovich and long supported the Kuchma government. This year, Russian prosecutors demanded her extradition on charges of bribing Russian defense officials. The Chief Military Prosecutor’s Office announced Dec. 8 that it will soon send to court a criminal case involving two officers of the Defense Ministry’s Central Logistics Directorate accused of receiving bribes from her.

Tymoshenko and Yushchenko are seen as pro-Western politicians who favor strengthening Ukraine’s ties with the European Union and the United States, which raises questions about whether the Russian charges were politically motivated.

After Russian authorities issued a warrant, Tymoshenko was briefly listed as wanted on an Interpol website early this month, but her photo was removed the same day. Interpol reportedly asked for more information on the case.

Asked about the Russian allegations at a news conference, Tymoshenko responded with humor.

“As snow melts in the spring, all these charges will disappear as soon as the presidential campaign is over,” she said. “I was especially entertained by the international search warrant. If this were true, we’d have to meet at a spy apartment. We’d have to bring the journalists blindfolded. I’d have to come in a long, black coat with a hat, sunglasses and a false mustache.

“Russia uses this to fight the politicians it’s afraid of. This actually flatters me, that Russia believes I can stand up for the national interests of Ukraine.”