You're reading: Ex-doctor of Tymoshenko slams prison’s health service

A former physician of imprisoned ex-prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko said the ailing former premier is denied essential medical assistance and that the medical unit at the jail, where she is serving a seven-year term, "has the standards of a squalid rural first-aid post."

"I was able to see nothing else in that prison than a lot of window dressing and commissioned reviews. The medical station has the standards of a squalid rural first-aid post. There were banal instruments there that were not even plugged into the mains. They just picked a room, painted the walls and made those who were inside wear overshoes and gowns as though there was any sterility there," Viacheslav Perederiy, first deputy chairman of parliament’s health care committee, who was Tymoshenko’s doctor from the late 90s to 2002, told Interfax-Ukraine after a visit to the Kachanivska Penal Colony in Kharkiv.

"I was most surprised by the attitude of the doctors. They speak not as doctors but as officials, with standard, prefabricated sentences," he said.

Perederiy cited German doctors who had co-examined Tymoshenko as insisting the ex-premier needed immediate hospitalization in a specialist clinic.

"Part of her illness are terrible pains – terrible. What they are doing to her can be called torture through pain. There is an article in the Criminal Code that punishes failure to render medical assistance when it is needed," Perederiy said.

He also expressed indignation at the fact that he and another seven lawmakers representing BYT-Batkivschyna parliamentary faction had not been allowed into the prison for two hours.

Tymoshenko was convicted last year of abusing her authority by pulling off a controversial natural gas deal with Russia in 2009.