Jailed opposition leader Yulia Tymoshenko asked European leaders on Nov. 27 to sign a landmark free trade and association deal with Ukraine if President Viktor Yanukovych agrees to do so even without her release.
Ukraine and the European Union had been planning to sign this historic pact at the Eastern Partnership Summit in Vilnius, Lithuania on Nov. 28-29, until the country’s government issued a decree on Nov. 21 claiming it had stopped preparations to ink the deal over pressure from Russia.
The Kremlin imposed trade sanctions on many Ukrainian goods in past months and threatened more severe measures if Kyiv signs the EU deal. Russia would prefer Ukraine join the Russian-led Customs Union.
Europe has called the release of Tymoshenko, whose seven-year prison term for abuse of power while in office it considers as politically motivated, a major precondition for Ukraine signing the association with the 28-member bloc.
But since the country’s leadership paused talks of association with the EU, Tymoshenko’s fate has been called into question.
“If Yanukovych makes a positive decision, I fervently ask you to sign the deal without any hesitation and conditions including regarding my release,” Tymoshenko said in her address to European leaders, which was read by her daughter Eugenia following her visit to the hospital where Tymoshenko has been kept since May 2012.
On Nov. 27 Tymoshenko celebrated her 53rd birthday.
Europe hoped it could solve the Tymoshenko issue by encouraging Ukraine’s government to allow her to travel for to Germany for medical care. She suffers from severe back pain.
Yanukovych, Tymoshenko’s political political rival, claimed he could support this idea if parliament approves a law allowing for convicts to go abroad for treatment in severe cases. Yet despite lawmakers’ six proposed bills, lawmakers from Yanumovych’s ruling Party of Regions rejected all of them.
Tymoshenko said that her release would be a “test of the Ukrainian leadership to think and act in the European way” and added that Yanukovych’s recent refusal to sign the EU pact was provoked by plans of “legitimizing his authoritarian regime.”
“Yes, Russia is really pressuring (Ukraine), but this pressure would not prevent Yanukovych from signing the deal if he was sure that it keeps him in office,” Tymoshenko said.
She claimed that if Yanukovych does not sign the association agreement at the summit in Vilnius he will never do it.
So, if he refuses to sign it in the next few days, Tymoshenko said, it would be time for Europe to “leave a dictatorship no room for survival” and apply all peaceful means to secure free presidential elections in 2015.
Kyiv Post staff writer Oksana Grytsenko can be reached at [email protected].
