You're reading: Tymoshenko’s daughter urges world community’s assistance to release Ukrainian political prisoners

Eugenia Tymoshenko, daughter of jailed former Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, has called on the world community to increase pressure on the current Ukrainian authorities via sanctions in order to release former Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko from illegal imprisonment.

“[Ukrainian President Viktor] Yanukovych’s main task is to keep my mother in prison for the elections in 2015. Everyone knows it today. We realize that we cannot do anything by ourselves in Ukraine. That’s why we need the world community’s support,” she said in an interview with the Voice of America, reads a posting on Tymoshenko’s Web site.

According to Yevhenia Tymoshenko, Ukraine is quickly turning into a police state.

“I am not exaggerating, Ukraine is turning into a police state, dictatorship. My mother warned the world and the international community about this before the parliamentary elections. And now even more efforts are applied to create this dictatorship in Ukraine,” she said.

Earlier, U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine John Tefft in an interview with the Ukrainska Pravda Web site said that if Yulia Tymoshenko is barred from the presidential election in 2015, the United States and the OSCE will consider it as an offense of democratic standards.

Tymoshenko was detained during a court session on August 5, 2011. On October 11 that year, a court in Kyiv convicted her of abuse of office, accusing her of unlawfully orchestrating a natural gas deal with Russia in 2009 that allegedly ran against Ukraine’s interests.

Tymoshenko was sentenced to seven years in prison. She was moved to a jail in Kharkiv in December 2011, but has been taking inpatient treatment at one of Kharkiv’s hospitals since May 2012.