You're reading: Democracy group worried about Tymoshenko’s health

Ukraine's jailed opposition leader, Yulia Tymoshenko, is "strong in spirit but frail in body", but there is no firm indication she might go abroad for treatment, according to a member of a pro-democracy group that visited her jail on April 4.

Reports have circulated that Tymoshenko, a former prime minister who is serving a seven-year sentence for abuse of office, will be taken to Germany for treatment of a back problem after the Berlin government said it was in talks with Kyiv.

One of five members of a group from U.S.-based Freedom House who saw her in her prison cell in Kharkiv, eastern Ukraine, said she had expressed confidence in the care she had already been given in jail by Canadian and German doctors.

But the 51-year-old Tymoshenko had given no indication of any plans to go abroad for treatment. The back problem prevented her on April 4 from sitting up in bed, Damon Wilson said.

Speculation that Kyiv may be easing its position under pressure from the West grew on April 2 when prosecutors said she would be allowed to leave prison to get treatment.

Several Western visitors and groups have been refused entry to see Tymoshenko and visit by Freedom House, a non-government organisation promoting democracy and human rights, on April 4 was a comparative rarity.

Tymoshenko, a charismatic figure who has twice been prime minister, was jailed in October on a charge of exceeding her powers by brokering a poor gas supply deal with Russia in 2009.

The leadership of President Viktor Yanukovich says the deal saddled Ukraine with the economic millstone of an exorbitant price for gas. She rejects the charges.

The United States and the European Union support the view of the opposition that her trial and similar action against her allies, including former interior minister Yuri Lutsenko, are "selective justice" and politically motivated.

Wilson said Tymoshenko had lain flat during the hour the group was with her, and had said she could not sit without painkillers.

"This is a real issue. It is not fabricated. She could not sit while we were there. She lay down for the whole time. She was strong in spirit but frail in body," he told Reuters by telephone.

Wilson, who has met Tymoshenko several times before, said she looked pale. Her voice was "subdued but firm".

Tymoshenko’s rhetoric brought tens of thousands of people out onto streets of the Ukrainian capital in 2004 during the Orange Revolution street protests.

Those protests doomed Yanukovich’s first bid for the presidency. Yanukovich beat Tymoshenko narrowly for the presidency in February 2010 and she has accused him of being behind her trial.

Yanukovich, who met the leader of the Freedom House delegation on Wednesday, has declined to interfere in the court’s verdict.