Yulia TYMOSHENKO

Yulia Tymoshenko is the Leader of the political party ‘Batkivshchyna’ and former Prime Minister of Ukraine. She comes from Dnipropetrovsk (Eastern Ukraine). At the end of 1996, Yulia Tymoshenko was for the first time elected to the Parliament of Ukraine. In 1999, she founded and chaired the All-Ukrainian Union ‘Batkivshchyna’. On December 30, 1999, Yulia Tymoshenko was appointed as Deputy Prime Minister on fuel and energy issues. On February 13, 2001, she was arrested. The arrest was generally viewed as a punishment for her pro-democratic activity. However, in March, the Kyiv Pechersky Court found the accusations to be groundless and released her.
In November 2004, Yulia Tymoshenko became one of the leaders of the Orange Revolution, a democratic popular uprising in Ukraine that broke out as a protest against rigged presidential elections. On February 4, 2005, the Verkhovna Rada appointed Yulia Tymoshenko as the Prime Minister with the record 373 votes. In July 2005, the Forbes magazine named PM Tymoshenko the 3rd most-influential woman in the world. In 2007, she was awarded the Prize for Courage Politique by the Sorbonne Association de Politique Etrangere et Politique Internationale. On December 18, 2007, Yulia Tymoshenko was again appointed as the Prime Minister of Ukraine.
In the 2010 Presidential elections, she narrowly lost to Viktor Yanukovych and immediately afterwards the Yanukovych government launched a number of trumped-up politically motivated investigations against her. On August 5, 2011, Yulia Tymoshenko was arrested, and on October 11 the court found her guilty for “abuse of power while signing the gas agreements with the Russian Federation in January 2009”. She was sentenced to seven years in prison. European and world leaders, numerous international institutions, human rights NGOs, and diaspora worldwide condemned the biased trial and selective justice, and named the sentence politically-motivated. On February 22, 2014, Yulia Tymoshenko was released from prison following the overthrow of the Yanukovych regime. She participated in the 2014 Presidential elections and came 2nd in the vote. After the 2014 Parliamentary elections, she chaired the ‘Batkivshchyna’ Fraction in the Parliament.