Batkivschyna Party leader and former Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko has said she believes that the EU should make a proper assessment of the current political situation in the country, and hopes that the EU will play a decisive role in preventing the establishment of a dictatorship in Ukraine.
"It is very important to react now, when authoritarianism has not yet turned into dictatorship. Therefore, we expect the EU to correctly assess what is happening in Ukraine," she said in an interview with Austrian daily newspaper Der Standard, which was posted on her Web site on Friday.
Tymoshenko said that if the commitments facing Ukraine in its aspiration to join the EU were not met, the EU would have to ask "if the rhetoric and position of the Ukrainian president [in fact] contradict his actions and his so-called reforms."
"The role of the EU in preventing the establishment of an open dictatorship in Ukraine is enormous. I would say that it is crucial," Tymoshenko said.
When asked whether the Batkivschyna Party is planning to participate in parliamentary elections in 2012, she said: "Of course. We know how to reform the country."
Tymoshenko also compared incumbent Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych to former Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev.
"I believe that Yanukovych as president resembles Brezhnev in his late age. A sign of this, unfortunately, is his similar intellectual level, the absurdity of power, and, of course, the strengthening of the Soviet idea that all this power should be concentrated in the hands of one person," she said.
