Lithuania leader to visit Tymoshenko in hospital

Lithuania's president, Dalia Grybauskaite, is due to meet on Friday with former Ukrainian prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko at the hospital where the incarcerated ex-premier is taking treatment, an assistant to the head of Ukraine's State Penitentiary Service Ihor Andrushko said on Thursday. "We will help [arrange the meeting]," Andrushko told Interfax-Ukraine. "There is no problem on the part of the Penitentiary Service."

The meeting, to be held at a Ukrainian Railroads clinic in Kharkiv, will take place between 1530 and 1600, Andrushko said.

Earlier, diplomatic sources told Interfax-Ukraine that Grybauskaite was planning to visit Tymoshenko in the hospital.

On Tuesday, Daiva Ulbinaite, an adviser to Grybauskaite, said the president would go ahead with a planned visit to Ukraine despite the cancellation of a multinational summit in Yalta that the Lithuanian leader had been going to attend. Grybauskaite would set off for Ukraine on Friday, and was planning to look up Tymoshenko, Ulbinaite said.

The "broad format" summit, which would have taken place on Friday and Saturday, had been organized by Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych but was called off after the leaders of Austria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Latvia, Germany, Italy, Slovenia, and Bulgaria announced they would boycott it.