prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko, sentenced to seven years in jail on Tuesday, has combined feminine charisma with hard-edged pragmatism for over a decade in the macho world of Ukrainian politics. But the woman known in Ukraine as the “Iron Lady” after her heroine Margaret Thatcher, or as just “Vona” (“She”), now must draw on all her reserves of steel after her conviction on charges of abusing her powers while in office. “We will fight and defend my good name in the European court,” she said defiantly after being sentenced. “We have to be strong and defend Ukraine from this authoritarianism.” The charges relate to a deal for gas imports she signed with Russia in 2009 which prosecutors say exceeded her powers and caused an almost $200 million loss to the Ukrainian budget. The court had placed her under arrest on August 5, and ever since she has been held in the Lukyanovsky detention centre in Kiev, a far cry from the halcyon days when she headed the government and rubbed shoulders with world leaders. She has portrayed her trial as a “political lynching” led by the man who defeated her in the 2010 presidential elections but who she helped humiliate in the pro-Western 2004 Orange Revolution, President Viktor Yanukovych. Her last stint in office did little to endear her to Ukrainians as she seemed to revel in a sometimes farcical falling out with then president Viktor Yushchenko as the economy lurched from one disaster to another. After helping lead the pro-democracy Orange Revolution and serving as prime minister, she set her sights in 2010 on the top job of president but lost out in a bitterly personal contest to Yanukovych. In a dramatic sequence of events, she was then briefly imprisoned on charges of forgery and gas smuggling. The charges, which she says were politically motivated, were quashed in 2005 in mysterious circumstances.
