The mostly middle-aged women in the crowd on March 18 in Sloviansk, a war-torn Donetsk Oblast city of 111,000 people located 670 kilometers southeast of Kyiv, are clamoring for former prime minister and current presidential candidate Yulia Tymoshenko to come up to them.
“Yulia Vladimirovna! Yulia! Yulichka, come here!” they call to her in turn.
Tymoshenko approaches them, holds their hands, hugs them, patiently listens to everyone and promises them almost anything — to reduce the cost of natural gas, to increase pensions, to remove the head of a gas company, and even to restore water supplies to one particular house.
Less than two weeks before the presidential election on March 31, Tymoshenko is deploying all the charm and populism that she can muster to attract more supporters in the crucial vote.
Tymoshenko led the presidential polls until January, when her rating dropped several percentage points and she was pushed out of the top spot by actor and political satirist Volodymyr Zelenskiy.
Now President Petro Poroshenko threatens to push her out of the second round. He and she are polling with similar numbers behind Zelenskiy. Assuming none of the candidates wins a majority of the vote, the top-two vote getters in the March 31 first-round election will advance to the April 21 runoff.
Tymoshenko’s trip to eastern Ukraine, where she has the least support, became essential.
“Even a half percent is important for her now,” said Volodymyr Fesenko, head of Penta political think tank.
When Zelenskiy took away part of Tymoshenko’s voters, Poroshenko’s team started hitting her with smear campaigns, Fesenko added.
But Tymoshenko still has her devoted supporters and also some oligarchs on her side. And people who know her well say the attacks only make her stronger.
“She’s a fighter,” said political consultant Oleksiy Kovzhun, who worked with Tymoshenko in the 2000s.
Lawmaker Serhiy Vlasenko, deputy head of Tymoshenko’s party, said she has nothing to worry about.
“Better to let Petro Oleksiyovych (Poroshenko) think how he’s going to get into the second round,” he said.
Third try
Tymoshenko, 58, a former gas trader, has experienced steep ups and downs in her political career, which started back in 1997. She twice served as prime minister and twice was put in jail, under the regimes of presidents Leonid Kuchma and Viktor Yanukovych.
Tymoshenko led the campaigns against both presidents and was deemed “Ukraine’s Jean D’Arc” during the Orange Revolution, a popular people’s uprising against rigged elections in 2004.
This will be her third try to become president after finishing in second place twice, losing to Yanukovych in 2010 and to Poroshenko in 2014.
When in February 2014 protesters of the EuroMaidan Revolution ousted Yanukovych and brought Tymoshenko from prison to the stage at Kyiv’s
Maidan Nezalezhnosti, or Independence Square, she didn’t look herself — hunched in a wheelchair, wearing baggy black clothes instead of her usual expressly feminine outfits.
But she came back soon enough to run in the presidential election that May, where she came second with 12.8 percent of the vote, and to take 20 members of her party, including herself, into the Verkhovna Rada in the parliamentary election later that year.
At first, she played a small role. But when the government started increasing the gas utility tariffs in 2015, Poroshenko’s rating steeply went down, and Tymoshenko, who started speaking about “tariff genocide,” began rising in the polls.
She gets strong support from economically poor residents of small towns and villages, who were the most severely hit by the gas price hikes.
“She knows gas issues well and she used the social discontent related to it,” Fesenko said.
Yulia Tymoshenko waves to her supporters while arriving at an election rally in Kyiv on Feb. 9, 2019. (Oleg Petrasiuk)
Limited electorate
In May, Tymoshenko tried to widen her electorate and attract younger voters and residents of big cities, organizing several forums, where she proposed to rewrite the country’s constitution, limiting the powers of the president and granting them to the chancellor, in a similar system to Germany’s.
She changed her trademark traditional braid for a more modern up-do and large glasses, and started talking about big data, blockchain and a “new social contract.”
But her rebranding hasn’t won her much more support. Her long-time voters didn’t understand her, and the young electorate didn’t believe her.
In January, when her party officially nominated Tymoshenko as a presidential candidate, several thousand people were in attendance — but most of them were middle-aged women. Catering to that audience, she made the promise to cut the gas utility tariffs in half one of the main slogans of her campaign.
Over the next two months, her rating remained the same, while the ratings of her main competitors Poroshenko and Zelenskiy rose.
“Tymoshenko is not creating any strong messages apart from cutting the gas prices,” said sociologist Inna Volosevych, the deputy director at the Info Sapiens research agency.
Her typical voters are middle-aged women living in rural areas of central and western Ukraine. But their support might not be enough to get her into the second round, according to political technologist Serhiy Gaidai, who consulted for Tymoshenko in 2018.
Her other former consultant Kovzhun agrees.
“She has nowhere to grow and each new supporter is gained with much more effort than the previous one,” Kovzhun said.
Fesenko said Tymoshenko had started her campaign too early and now it’s hard for her “to keep its tempo, drive, and energy.”
Frauds
Another of Tymoshenko’s problems is Poroshenko. In 2005, they were fighting for influence over then-President Viktor Yushchenko. Now they are clashing for a place in the second round, with both reportedly using dirty tricks.
On Feb. 22, Tymoshenko accused Poroshenko of ungentlemanly behavior, claiming that presidential candidate Yuriy Tymoshenko, whose last name and initials are identical to hers, is a Poroshenko scam aimed at distracting her voters, who may vote for him by mistake.
“If you are a man and also president of the country and commander in chief, why don’t you have the bravery to fight honestly?!” she said at a press conference.
When Poroshenko largely relies on government resources and support of the Prosecutor General’s Office, led by his friend Yuriy Lutsenko, and the SBU state security service, Tymoshenko has a network consisting of her Batkivshchyna (Fatherland) Party and good relations with country’s top cop, Interior Minister Arsen Avakov.
It was Tymoshenko who first accused Poroshenko of vote-buying in late February and brought the evidence to Avakov’s office, claiming Poroshenko was planning to buy six million people with paying them Hr 1,000 (about $37) each. Avakov said the deputy head of Poroshenko’s party faction, Serhiy Berezenko, is mentioned in a criminal investigation.
After that, the state security service accused Tymoshenko of doing the same, revealing an alleged scheme involving two lawmakers, later identified as Tymoshenko party members Valeriy Dubil and Ruslan Bohdan.
On March 20, Lutsenko posted on Facebook a photo of a sack full with cash and hinted that all that money, Hr 2.5 million (almost $93,000), were supposed to be spent for vote-buying by Tymoshenko in Dubno, a western Ukrainian city of 35,000 residents. Lutsenko called Tymoshenko “candidate Y” when saying that it was “lawmaker D” — most likely Dubil — organizing the vote-buying scheme.
In mid-March, someone started calling, allegedly on behalf of the Opora election watchdog, and threatening Tymoshenko’s voters with criminal responsibility, saying that the candidate was involved in vote-buying, Olga Aivazovska, head of Opora, told the Kyiv Post. Opora notified the police.
Fesenko said Tymoshenko can’t match Poroshenko’s money, so she would get outspent in any attempt to buy voters. Poroshenko’s representatives have denied vote buying.
Scandals
In response to the attacks on her, Tymoshenko has tried to milk a corruption scandal involving the president’s allies for all it is worth. The Nashi Groshi TV investigative program alleged massive embezzlement in the defense sector by Poroshenko’s ally, Oleg Hladkovskiy, and his son Ihor Hladkovskiy.
She initially spoke about the impeachment of Poroshenko, then switched to guaranteeing criminal investigations. In an interview with journalist Sonia Koshkina published on March 7, Tymoshenko promised to “turn the stomachs (of allegedly corrupt officials) inside out and see what they had consumed over the years.”
But another investigation by Nashi Groshi revealed Tymoshenko’s team also used murky tactics. Her party received transactions worth millions of dollars in 2018 from dummy donors, whose names were used sometimes even without their knowledge. Journalists also found that people involved in this scheme were linked to runaway lawmaker Oleksandr Onishchenko, a vehement critic of Poroshenko, who is now being investigated for gas embezzlement. Tymoshenko and Onyshchenko denied this connection.
Tymoshenko tried to explain the dummy donors, claiming that rich Ukrainian entrepreneurs had to donate money to her through their relatives for fears of persecution.
When Tymoshenko claimed that about half out of 39 presidential candidates are fake ones working in favor of Poroshenko, Aivazovska, from Opora, said Tymoshenko also has several dummy candidates on her side. For a candidate, having several “dummy candidates” among competitors gives the perk of controlling more people in the election commissions around Ukraine, since every candidate is allowed the same quota of representatives.
Poroshenko Bloc lawmaker Maksym Savrasov published on March 20 a protocol of the meeting of the district election commission in Chernivtsi, where Tymoshenko’s representative claimed she was the coordinator of a group of representatives of eight other candidates. One of them was businessman and lawmaker Serhiy Taruta, who on March 16 publicly endorsed Tymoshenko without technically withdrawing his candidacy.
Tymoshenko’s ally Vlasenko claimed the protocol was fake.
Oligarchs
In 2005, Tymoshenko became a big enemy of Ukraine’s oligarchs, when her government challenged privatization of Kryvorizhstal, country’s largest steel mill, by Rinat Akhmetov and Victor Pinchuk, claiming it was bought on the cheap. Tymoshenko was personally present at a televised auction, where Mittal Steel bought the plant for $4.8 billion, nearly six times more than Akhmetov and Pinchuk paid for it a year earlier.
But now, Tymoshenko’s relations with Ukraine’s oligarchs have turned significantly warmer.
The endorsement of Taruta won’t help her in the polls, but might help her financially, Fesenko said.
Also, on March 17, Tymoshenko appared on the Sunday prime time TV show on ICTV channel, which belongs to Pinchuk.
On March 7, someone uploaded to British video sharing website Liveleak an intercepted phone conversation in which a woman with a voice resembling Tymoshenko’s gave birthday congratulations to a man who sounded like billionaire oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky. The alleged phone call pumped the long-running rumor that Kolomoisky was backing Tymoshenko financially, which her team denies.
“I want to thank you on your birthday for all, for the fact that you can be a real friend, a real partner in all of the most important issues,” the woman is heard saying on the tape.
Vlasenko neither confirmed nor denied the authenticity of the conversation.
While Kolomoisky in 2015 called Tymoshenko a political “prostitute,” in recent interviews the oligarch called her a “favorite” and said he would support any presidential candidate able to defeat Poroshenko.
Fesenko said Tymoshenko and Kolomoisky could make a temporary deal against Poroshenko, which doesn’t mean she is dependent on the oligarch.
“Each one just has his own interest here,” he said.
Ex-Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko lost her legal challenge to remove Yuriy Tymoshenko, a candidate who entered the race to confuse her voters. (Courtesy)
Foreign lobbyists
In early March, Tymoshenko campaigned in several western Ukrainian cities, beeing followed by Hollywood producer Mary Lambert and director Shawn Thompson. Lambert later announced she is working on a documentary about Tymoshenko and the role of Paul Manafort, an imprisoned former political consultant to Yanukovych, in Tymoshenko’s imprisonment in 2011.
“Yulia has star quality,” she told the Kyiv Post.
Thought Lambert denied being paid by Tymoshenko or anybody else to do this project, Tymoshenko’s team is believed to be using foreign lobbyists.
In 2017, she was the first Ukrainian politician to meet the U. S. President Donald Trump, although her team refused to reveal details of the meeting.
In February 2018, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s investigative TV project Schemes revealed that Tymoshenko had a deal with Avenue Strategies, a U.S. lobbying firm, from at least February 2018 to August 2018, paying them $65,000 per month. Tymoshenko denied paying the U.S. lobbyists and failing to put the spending on her yearly declaration.
Fresh ideas
On March 17, Tymoshenko’s Instagram account posted a video of her buying a hotdog at a gas station on the way to Sloviansk.
“Don’t tell anybody this is for me,” she told a vendor, giggling, in an attempt to attract younger voters perhaps and show that she is a regular person.
Bringing fresh ideas to her campaign is essential for her to survive the first round, Fesenko said.
Her office, located in Kyiv’s Podil area, has lots of house plants, and lots of photos — most from the 2004 Orange Revolution, which prevented Yanukovych from coming to power, and the 2013–2014 EuroMaidan Revolution, which forced Yanukovych out of power. There is also an entire wall in one room with attractive portraits of Tymoshenko in different periods of her life.
While Tymoshenko is polite with her colleagues and ready to hear criticism, Kovzhun and Gaidai said that she takes all decisions herself.
Politics is her main passion. Getting so close to her long-timer dream of being elected president has made her more intense, both physically and emotionally, Kovzhun said.
“This is like a last battle for her,” he added.
