Former ‘Gas Princess,' current candidate not afraid to speak out
Make no mistakes about it: The Yulia Tymoshenko bloc is all about its namesake persona, an attractive but tough‑as‑nails dissident‑oligarch turned reformer.
“In reality, this is one of a few blocs and parties that is totally reliant upon one person,” said Ihor Zhdanov, senior political analyst at the Razumkov Ukrainian Center for Economic and Political Studies. “The entire bloc’s rating is tied solely to Tymoshenko’s rating.”
Tymoshenko, a 42‑year‑old Dnipropetrovsk native, is arguably Ukraine’s wealthiest and most influential woman.
She is a fierce opponent of President Leonid Kuchma and what she and her allies describe as his inner circle of corrupt oligarchs. Her opponents say she’s just as bad. And neither side pulls any punches.
Take, for example, a flyer her bloc’s headquarters mailed to voters recently. It tells them that Ukraine is ruled by a totalitarian regime headed by Kuchma, and identifies a close group of Kuchma’s alleged cronies by name, including Viktor Pinchuk, the president’s son‑in‑law.
“I will never be a silent participant in this genocide of the Ukrainian nation,” the brochure reads. “No amount of money or falsified information about me, and no jail cell, will intimidate me and keep me silent or inactive.”
But Tymoshenko’s critics allege that she has a dark past of her own.
She first made headlines in the mid‑1990s, while in command of United Energy Systems of Ukraine, a $1 billion gas trading company that she had co‑founded. That’s where she picked up the moniker “Ukraine’s Gas Princess.”
Critics, including her current political opponents, allege that Tymoshenko transformed UES Ukraine into an empire thanks to fat government contracts unfairly awarded by then‑Prime Minister Pavlo Lazarenko. Today, Lazarenko is in jail in the United States awaiting trial on money‑laundering charges.
Critics, like former President Leonid Kravchuk, say Tymoshenko and close allies who remain loyal to her were part of a clan of business moguls headed by Lazarenko. Their businesses, Kravchuk said, fed off Lazarenko’s. Kravchuk said Lazarenko used his position to attain personal control over much of Ukraine’s economy.
Tymoshenko told the Post her business dealings have always been clean, and she left it at that.
One of her closest allies, deputy Oleksandr Turchynov of the Fatherland party, which Tymoshenko founded, was a bit more forthcoming.
“When Lazarenko was prime minister, everyone had to deal with him,” he said. “From what we know, the closest person to Lazarenko was Kuchma himself.”
Tymoshenko may have become rich through unfair, nontransparent gas‑trading deals, as her critics allege. But they can’t deny that she has won over Western analysts who praised energy reforms she implemented while deputy prime minister last year. Those reforms were intended to root out precisely the sort of nontransparent deals that allegedly enriched her.
Mykhailo Pohrebinsky, director of Kyiv’s Institute for Conflict Studies, has criticized her energy reforms and says she used the same strategy to gain power that Lazarenko used.
“Her reforms were not market‑oriented,” Pohrebinsky said. “They mirror Lazarenko’s strategy while in government. She tried to put the entire energy sector under her own administrative control.”
Tymoshenko’s energy reforms made her unpopular among the Ukrainian oligarchs with interests in the sector. In January of last year, following a year of service, she was sacked from the government and jailed for weeks on corruption charges stemming from her gas‑trading days. Tymoshenko alleges that this was her reward for eliminating schemes that allowed oligarch groups to siphon money out of the nation’s troubled energy sector.
Since then, Tymoshenko has bounced between jail cells, courtrooms, hospital beds and her home in Kyiv, where she was confined until recently by a court order preventing her from leaving the capital.
Tymoshenko said prosecutors are using criminal investigation to prevent her from meeting with voters. However, the Supreme Court’s failure to review the case last week will allow her to campaign freely up to the March 31 parliamentary elections.
“I will not be back in Kyiv until after the elections. I will be traveling in the regions and meeting with voters,” she said last week.
Without the ability to travel and meet voters face‑to‑face, her bloc’s chances of winning sufficient votes would have been bleak. The bloc claims it is already at a disadvantage by what amounts to a politically inspired media blackout imposed by major Ukrainian media outlets, most of which are controlled by pro‑presidential forces.
Winning hearts
Whatever the reality, Tymoshenko’s image has certainly been transformed to that of reformer.
Myron Wasylyk, managing director of PBN, a public relations firm, says harsh tactics against Tymoshenko have backfired.
“Obviously, Yulia Tymoshenko’s image has changed from oligarch to reformer, and definitely oppositionist,” Wasylyk said. “But I don’t think it was changed by her own devices. I think this was done pretty much with the help of general prosecutors and the parties of power, who turned her into a martyr.”
“She is filling a niche which is very much anti‑government. She found it, created it, is riding it and will probably get elected by it,” Wasylyk said.
Tymoshenko has even won the hearts of old Ukrainian freedom fighters, such as Stepan Khmara and Levko Lukyanenko, both of whom spent many years in Soviet prisons for their anti‑Soviet views.
“The Tymoshenko bloc is the best bloc for voters in the entire history of independent Ukraine,” Khmara said. “She is an active patriot, and a 100 percent patriot of Ukraine. She proved this with her energy reforms. The attempts to tie her to Lazarenko are nothing more than black PR attempts initiated by the current regime.”
Khmara, who merged his Ukrainian Conservative Republican Party with Tymoshenko’s Fatherland party last year, said he would remain with her bloc in parliament.
Wasylyk said Tymoshenko has also won the hearts of many of Ukraines voters.
“I think she really earned her reform stripes while in the Yushchenko government, when she increased payments in the energy sector,” Wasylyk said. “That might have made her a red flag to the oligarchs. But in the voters’ eyes, the fact that she was willing to stand up to the oligarchs proved she was for real.”
Turchynov said his bloc’s main promise to voters is to continue cleaning up Ukraine, just as Tymoshenko did for the country’s energy sector.
Pohrebinsky said Tymoshenko voters are mostly radical oppositionists. “There are not many of them, but they do exist,” Pohrebinsky said.
Voter Support
Tymoshenko alleges that the oligarchs have struck back by restricting her access to the media.
“The major media channels have consistently denied her access to time on their programming, and even prohibited her from buying ads,” Pohrebinsky said. “I think Tymoshenko’s bloc could get much more support if she had her own TV channel.”
Tymoshenko and Turchynov say things are even worse.
Regional officials have sabotaged some of their gatherings, they say. They also claim that about 180 candidates for single‑mandate districts are allied with the bloc, but have kept quiet, as many who openly declared their allegiance were denied registration. The party’s financial backers are also keeping a low profile, Turchynov says.
Still, both Pohrebinsky and Razumkov’s Zhdanov are convinced the bloc will pass the 4‑percent barrier. Pohrebinsky believes the bloc could even get 6 percent of the vote for party‑list candidates, and Zhdanov said 7 percent is possible. But both had a hard time predicting how many seats the bloc would muster in the single‑mandate constituencies.
Tymoshenko is happy to be out of jail and free to travel during the campaign, but she warns that her bloc could still fall victim to large‑scale election fraud.
“There is strong preparation in the regions for mass fraud,” she said. “For example, young people are being gathered and trained to offer voters filled‑in ballots as they enter the voting booths, along with $10 in cash.”
Other reformist blocs, including Viktor Yushchenko’s Our Ukraine and Oleksandr Moroz’s Socialist Party, could also fall victim to these vote‑fraud techniques, Tymoshenko said.
Pohrebinsky said Tymoshenko has adjusted to the unfair use of administrative resources against her.
Wasylyk agrees, saying Tymoshenko has successfully compensated for the TV blackout by hitting the campaign trail to meet with voters in person. He agreed with this strategy, saying that just appearing on television does not win votes.
“It’s a grassroots approach … traditional but very effective,” he said.
