BILA TSERKVA, Ukraine – The election campaign has not been going smoothly for three-time presidential candidate Yulia Tymoshenko.
Once a frontrunner of the polls, she recently slid down to the second place in ratings, losing out to a comedian actor without any political experience, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, and in some polls, she’s third after Zelenskiy and President Petro Poroshenko.
In addition, her set-piece rally in Bila Tserkva on Feb. 8 was disrupted by smoke flares and a bomb threat.
Tymoshenko kicked off her nationwide “New Course for Ukraine” campaign tour on Feb. 5 in her hometown of Dnipro.
By the end of the week, she was in Bila Tserkva, a city of 203,000 people located 86 kilometers south of Kyiv – a budding regional hub with a new industrial park opened by businessman Vasyl Khmelnytskyi and an international airport under construction.
At the rally on the town square, the core crowd was a mix of young people from Tymoshenko’s official fan club, folks from the regional branch of Tymoshenko’s Batkivshchyna party, and pensioners, mainly elderly ladies, bused in from nearby villages.
Young people from the “I’m for Tymoshenko” fan club are accompanying Tymoshenko on her tour, creating a loud and visible cheerleading crowd at rallies, waving flags and banners, and shouting slogans at the command of their coordinator.
However, the key pillar of Tymoshenko’s voter base is the pensioners. According to polls, she’s a leading candidate among people over 60. A group of elderly women from the village Stavyshche (about 45 kilometers south of Bila Tserkva) said 300 of them had been invited and bussed to the rally. They bravely endured two hours standing outdoors in sub-zero temperature listening to Tymoshenko’s number-heavy monologue.
The VoxCheck fact-checking platform recently named Tymoshenko the top liar in Ukrainian politics. As a professional politician and populist, she uses a lot of statistics in her speeches. And while she uses real data, fact-checkers found there’s a pattern of omission of information and manipulation with facts that leaves very little truth in her words.
Her speech in Bila Tserkva wasn’t an exception. For instance, speaking about the importance of keeping young talent in Ukraine, she spoke of Jan Koum, the co-founder of the WhatsApp messenger, who was born in Soviet Ukraine and emigrated to the United States in 1992.
“Having a high level of intelligence, he created with his friends software called WhatsApp,” Tymoshenko said. “All young people use it on their phones. Do you know how much he sold WhatsApp to Facebook for?”
After taking few long-shot guesses from the crowd she announced: “For $19 billion. That’s one-fifth of the gross domestic product of Ukraine.”
A collective gasp of astonishment followed.
Tymoshenko didn’t mention, however, that Koum likely would not have invented WhatsApp, had he not grown up and been educated in California, the cradle of modern information technology.
But her data-packed political statements worked their magic.
“Me and my gal pal Verochka admire her,” said retiree Galyna Kalifratova, who was brought to the meeting from the village of Fursy, 9 kilometers west of Bila Tserkva. Verochka was a tiny old lady wrapped in a huge fur coat that made her seem even tinier.
“She’s so smart. Speaking without notes. So many numbers. So many things have been analyzed. We’re huge fans,” Kalifratova said adding that she had kept Tymoshenko calendars printed for her first presidential campaign in 2010.
A Bila Tserkva resident Vasyl Oleksiyovych came to see the rally after work. He said he would vote for Tymoshenko because she is a woman.
“Of course I think female president will be better than those fat cats,” he said. “I like Dalia Grybauskaitė (the president of Lithuania.) A woman can put Ukraine in order, but she can’t do it alone. People’s awareness has to change too.”
Disruption
Besides speaking about her revolutionary socio-economic program, Tymoshenko took her time to lambaste current President Petro Poroshenko.
Poroshenko had been in Bila Tserkva three weeks earlier, on Jan. 26, as part of his “Tomos Tour” (the “tomos” is the deed of independence granted by the Orthodox church in Istanbul (Constantinople) to the newly-independent Ukrainian church, which previously was governed from Moscow.) In the city, he also welcomed home the soldiers of the 72nd Infantry Brigade returning to base from the Donbas frontlines.
Among other things, Tymoshenko accused Poroshenko of using a dirty trick of registering her near-namesake, Yuriy Volodymyrovych Tymoshenko, as a candidate. A common trick in Ukrainian elections is to register a candidate with an identical or near-identical name as a rival, in the hope that voters will vote for the “dummy” candidate by mistake. The other Tymoshenko is a member of parliament and war veteran who says he decided to run for the presidency on his own.
But the accusations didn’t end there.
Halfway into Tymoshenko’s rally, unidentified people fired two smoke flares into the crowd. The police quickly apprehended several men with more smoke flares. Moreover, police received a call about a bomb allegedly planted in a car parked near the stage. The car was searched and removed from the scene.
Batkivshchyna condemned the incidents, claiming they had been organized by the SBU security service on the orders of Poroshenko.
A man holds up a poster with the name of Vladyslav Manger, head of Kherson Oblast Council and ex-member of Batkivshchyna party, accused of organizing the deadly attack on Kherson activist Kateryna Gandziuk, at Tymoshenko’s campaign rally in Bila Tserkva on Feb. 8, 2019. (Photo by Volodymyr Petrov)
Furthermore, a few people held up sheets of paper with Manger and Ryshchuk written on them – these are last names of two Kherson oblast officials accused of organizing a deadly acid attack on Kherson activist Kateryna Gandziuk.
Vladyslav Manger, head of Kherson Oblast Council, was expelled from the Batkivshchyna party on Feb. 8 and received a notice of suspicion concerning the murder on Feb. 11.
