You're reading: Prosecutor: Tymoshenko assaults prison guard

On top of the existing criminal cases that are piling up against Yulia Tymoshenko, the prosecutor's office is accusing the imprisoned former prime minister of assaulting a male guard in the Kharkiv prison where she is serving a seven-year sentence.

Renat Kuzmin, deputy
prosecutor general, told Segodnya daily newspaper that apart from
investigating Tymoshenko for crimes involving her former gas-trading
company and the 1996 murder of member of parliament Yevhen Shchebran,
she now is under investigation for assault.

“There is a case on
Yulia Tymoshenko’s causing bodily injuries to the worker of the
isolation ward while he was on duty. There are other cases, they are
being investigated. And I can assure you that none of the cases will
remain. Every one of them will be finished in the legally defined
term and sent to court,” Kuzmin said.

Serhiy Vlasenko,
Tymoshenko’s defense lawyer, said the new case was “an idiocy”
cooked up by Kuzmin, whom he described as a person with “no moral
limits.”

“The level of lies
is going over the limit. Tomorrow she will probably be accused of
beating up all of her guards in the Kachaniska colony,” Vlasenko
said.

Tymoshenko has been
in jail for more than a year now. She is serving a seven-year prison
sentence in Kharkiv after being convicted for abuse of office for
signing a gas contract with Russia in 2009. She challenges the ruling
in both Ukrainian courts and the European Court for Human Rights,
whose first hearing is scheduled for Aug. 28.

Kuzmin also said
that the prosecutors are ready to formally accuse Tymoshenko of
complicity in the commissioning and financing of Shcherban’s
murder. They say the conspiracy involves former Prime Minister Pavlo
Lazarenko, now serving a prison sentence in America after a money
laundering conviction. Kuzmin said Lazarenko is ready to testify in
the case, and will be questioned by Ukrainian prosecutors as soon as
the U.S. authorities give them permission.

He also said that the
Shcherban case is ready to go to court as soon as the doctors allow
Tymoshenko to take part in the hearing, which is expected to be at
the end of September. Tymoshenko is currently being treated in a
Kharkiv hospital for spinal hernia, a painful back condition.

Vlasenko says
prosecutors have been pressuring Petro Kirichenko, a former Lazarenko
associate, to testify in the Shcherban case. Authorities detained his
wife, a cancer survivor, for 2.5 months on made-up charges. He
suspects that Kirichenko may have given the prosecutors what they
wanted to hear.

Vlasenko said that
Kuzmin’s statements “have no basis in reality.” In the Segodnya
newspaper interview, Kuzmin also said that he is hearing fewer
accusations in Europe that Tymoshenko’s cases are politically
motivated. “The Europeans are realizing that the legal argument is
weighty against any political accusation,” Kuzmin said.

However,
Tymoshenko’s lawyer refuted Kuzmin. “I
talk to the Europeans all the time, and I know that they firstly
think that Ukraine has a fully-formed dictatorship, and secondly,
that its leaders have neither morals, no conscience,” Vlasenko
said.

Kyiv Post editor
Katya Gorchinskaya can be reached at
[email protected]