Presidential adviser Hanna Herman accused supporters of embattled former Prime Minister and opposition leader Yulia Tymoshenko of playing into the hands of opponents of Ukraine’s deeper integration into the European Union by trying to discredit her political rival, President Viktor Yanukovych.
Presidential adviser Hanna Herman accused supporters of embattled former Prime Minister and opposition leader Yulia Tymoshenko of playing into the hands of opponents of Ukraine’s deeper integration into the European Union by trying to discredit her political rival, President Viktor Yanukovych.
Herman, a longtime ally of the president, was responding to the sharp reaction from Western capitals to the arrest of Tymoshenko on Aug. 5 for contempt of court during her abuse of office trial.
“Yulia is a Kolchuga,” Herman told Kyiv Post in an interview on Aug. 15, referring to the weapons system allegedly sold to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq by Ukraine, which led to then-President Leonid Kuchma being frozen out by the West after 2002.
Yanukovych’s government and the European Union are negotiating a deep-free trade deal and an association agreement, which both sides had said should be concluded this year.
But criticism by European officials of the trial of Tymoshenko on charges of exceeding her authority when concluding a natural gas contract with Russia in 2009 has led some analysts to speculate that negotiations could be delayed.
“There are a lot of different forces that do not like [Ukraine’s steps toward deeper European integration], that are prepared to find any possible ‘Kolchuga’ in order to weaken the current president and push him away from the West, to push him in the other direction,” Herman said.
Herman did not specifying which “forces” she was referring to in the comments.
“Yulia Tymoshenko is a very good mechanism to achieve that aim,” she added.
Other government officials have said Russia is putting Yanukovych under great pressure to reject the European deals in favor of a Moscow-led customs union that also includes Belarus and Kazakhstan.
Relations between Russia and Ukraine have deteriorated in recent months amid Yanukovych’s refusal to join the union, or to agree to further economic integration, including a proposed merger of the two countries’ state gas firms, Gazprom and Naftogaz.
Tymoshenko has encouraged the EU to push forward with negotiations on closer ties with Ukraine, but Herman accused her of provoking the judge in her trial into ordering her arrest by refusing to cooperate with the court.
Kyiv Post staff writer Rina Soloveitchik can be reached at [email protected]
