You're reading: Tymoshenko: Court verdict would not change anything in my life

Batkivshchyna Party leader Yulia Tymoshenko says she will continue to fight against the ruling regime even if she is convicted in the fabricated criminal case against her.

"If I’m given a conditional sentence, [my] team will enter parliament. I’m not a deputy right now, but I don’t work less actively or ineffectively because of this. That’s why all their attempts are pointless. I will have a criminal record, if they go for this, not for stealing hats from lavatories, this is clearly a political case and the entire democratic world knows this and is publicly saying this," Tymoshenko said in an interview with the magazine "Korrespondent", reads the official Tymoshenko’s website.

She says the authorities are mistaken if they think criminal persecution will remove her from the political arena.

"Political punishment is the government’s main goal in my case. They think that if they prevent me from participating in the parliamentary elections and I suddenly don’t become a deputy I will stop being the leader of this movement that believes that the current post-soviet, undemocratic regime must be removed. It makes no difference. History knows decent people who were convicted, take Vyacheslav Chornovil or Russian dissidents such as Andrei Sakharov, who were given horrible sentences, but this changed nothing in their lives," she explained.

However, she speculates that the government will continue to look for reasons to prosecute her.

"I don’t think this will end until the regime falls. One case is followed by a second and then a third and then it all turns into a farce, and it rains criminal cases. And those opening them don’t even realize how ridiculous it looks. Tomorrow they’ll recall that I broke a window in school or swam beyond the buoys," added the ex-premier.

"I don’t know how quickly this will all end. This probably depends on us, on all those people that don’t want to live in the criminal conditions Yanukovych is proposing. And even if they pass a sentence, whether I will be or not, my current team, good or bad, with its positives and negatives, problems and mistakes is the only one in the country that can stop this machine," said Tymoshenko.

Since late June, Pechersky District Court of Kyiv has been hearing a criminal case against Tymoshenko concerning gas supply agreements signed between Ukraine and Russia in 2009.

Tymoshenko denies the accusations and says the trial is an attempt by President Viktor Yanukovych to bar her from politics.

The new probe focuses on whether former Cabinet officials and employees of United Energy Systems of Ukraine, a firm managed by Tymoshenko in the mid 1990s, embezzled $405 million.