Yulia Tymoshenko
Yulia Volodymyrivna Tymoshenko is a Ukrainian politician, who served as Prime Minister of Ukraine in 2005, and again from 2007 until 2010; the first woman in Ukraine to hold that position. She has been a member of the Verkhovna Rada as People's Deputy of Ukraine several times between 1997 and 2007, and presently as of 2014, and was First Deputy Prime Minister of Ukraine for the fuel and energy complex from 1999 to 2001. She is a Candidate of Economic Sciences.
Tymoshenko is the leader of the Batkivshchyna political party. She supports Ukraine's integration into the European Union and strongly opposes the membership of Ukraine in the Russia-led Eurasian Customs Union. She supports NATO membership for Ukraine.
She co-led the Orange Revolution and was the first woman twice appointed and endorsed by parliamentary majority to become prime minister, serving from 24 January to 8 September 2005, and again from 18 December 2007 to 4 March 2010. She placed third in Forbes magazine's list of the world's most powerful women in 2005.
Tymoshenko finished second in the 2010 Ukrainian presidential election runoff, losing by 3.5 percentage points to the winner, Viktor Yanukovych. From 2011 to 2014, she was detained due to a criminal case that was seen by many as politically motivated persecution by President Viktor Yanukovych, but after the Revolution of Dignity she was rehabilitated by the Supreme Court of Ukraine and the European Court of Human Rights. In the concluding days of the Revolution of Dignity, she was released after three years in jail. She again finished second in the 2014 Ukrainian presidential election, this time to Petro Poroshenko. After being a heavy favorite in the polls for several years, she came third in the first round of the 2019 Ukrainian presidential election, receiving 13.40% of the vote, thus failing to qualify for the second round.
Re-elected to Ukraine's parliament in 2019, she led her party in opposition.
Early life and career
Tymoshenko was born Yulia Hrihyan on 27 November 1960, in Dnipropetrovsk, Ukrainian SSR, Soviet Union. Her mother, Lyudmila Telehina, was born on 11 August 1937, also in Dnipropetrovsk. Yulia's father, Volodymyr Hrihyan, who according to his Soviet Union passport was Latvian, was born on 3 December 1937, also in Dnipropetrovsk. He abandoned his wife and young daughter when Yulia was between one and three years old; Yulia used her mother's surname.Yulia's paternal grandfather, Abram Kapitelman, was born in 1914. After graduating from Dnipropetrovsk State University in 1940, Kapitelman was sent to work in Western Ukraine, where he worked "one academic quarter" as the director of a public Jewish school in the city Sniatyn. Kapitelman was mobilized into the army in the autumn of 1940 and subsequently was killed while taking part in the Great Patriotic War on 8 November 1944, with the rank of "lieutenant" in Signal corps.
Education
In 1977, Tymoshenko graduated from high school No. 75 in Dnipropetrovsk. In 1978, Tymoshenko was enrolled in the Automatization and Telemechanics Department of the Dnipropetrovsk Mining Institute. In 1979, she transferred to the Economics Department of the Dnipropetrovsk State University, majoring in cybernetic engineering and graduating in 1984 with first degree honors as an engineer-economist.In 1999, she defended her PhD dissertation, titled State Regulation of the tax system, at the Kyiv National Economic University and received a Ph.D. in economics.
Commercial career
Tymoshenko has worked as a practicing economist and academic. Prior to her political career, she became a successful but controversial businesswoman in the gas industry, becoming by some estimates one of the richest people in the country. Before becoming Ukraine's first female prime minister in 2005, Tymoshenko co-led the Orange Revolution. She was placed third in Forbes magazine's List of The World's 100 Most Powerful Women 2005.After graduating from the Dnipropetrovsk State University in 1984, Tymoshenko worked as an engineer-economist in the "Dnipro Machine-Building Plant" in Dnipropetrovsk until 1988.
In 1988, as part of the perestroika initiatives, Yulia and Oleksandr Tymoshenko borrowed 5,000 roubles and opened a video-rental cooperative, perhaps with the help of Oleksander's father, Gennadi Tymoshenko, who presided over a regional film-distribution network in the provincial council.
From 1989 to 1991, Yulia and Oleksandr Tymoshenko founded and led a commercial video-rental company "Terminal" in Dnipropetrovsk.
In 1991, Tymoshenko established "The Ukrainian Petrol Corporation", a company that supplied the agriculture industry of Dnipropetrovsk with fuel from 1991 to 1995. Tymoshenko worked as a general director. In 1995, this company was reorganized into United Energy Systems of Ukraine. Tymoshenko served as the president of United Energy Systems of Ukraine, a privately owned middleman company that became the main importer of Russian natural gas to Ukraine, from 1995 to 1 January 1997. During that time she was nicknamed the "gas princess". She was also accused of "having given Pavlo Lazarenko kickbacks in exchange for her company's stranglehold on the country's gas supplies", although Judge Martin Jenkins of the United States District Court for the Northern District of California, on 7 May 2004, dismissed the allegations of money laundering and conspiracy regarding UESU, Somoli Ent. et al. in connection with Lazarenko's activities. During this period, Tymoshenko was involved in business relations with many important figures of Ukraine. Tymoshenko also had to deal with the management of the Russian corporation, Gazprom. Tymoshenko claims that, under her management, UESU successfully solved significant economic problems: from 1995 to 1997, Ukraine's multi-billion debt for Russian natural gas was paid; Ukraine resumed international cooperation in machine building, the pipe industry and construction; and Ukraine's export of goods to Russia doubled. In the period of 1995 to 1997, Tymoshenko was considered one of the richest business people in Ukraine. When Tymoshenko made her initial foray into national politics, her company became an instrument of political pressure on her and on her family. UESU top management faced prosecution. Since 1998, Tymoshenko has been a prominent politician in Ukraine. She was not included in the list of "100 richest Ukrainians" in 2006.
Political career
Early career
Tymoshenko entered politics in 1996, when she was elected to the Verkhovna Rada in constituency No. 229, Bobrynets, Kirovohrad Oblast, winning a record 92.3% of the vote. In Parliament, Tymoshenko joined the Constitutional Centre faction. In February 1997 this centrists faction was 56 lawmakers strong and, according to Ukrainska Pravda, at first it supported the policies of Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma. In late 1997, Tymoshenko called for impeachment and the next Ukrainian Presidential elections to be held not in 1999, but in the fall of 1998. In late November 1997, the General Prosecutor of Ukraine asked the Verkhovna Rada to lift Tymoshenko's parliamentary immunity, but the deputies voted against it.Tymoshenko was re-elected in 1998, winning a constituency in the Kirovohrad Oblast, and was also number six on the party list of Hromada. She became an influential person in the parliament, and was appointed the Chair of the Budget Committee of the Verkhovna Rada. After Hromada's party leader Pavlo Lazarenko fled to the United States in February 1999 to avoid investigations for embezzlement, various faction members left Hromada to join other parliamentary factions, among them Tymoshenko, who set up the All-Ukrainian Union "Fatherland" faction in March 1999 in protest against the methods of Lazarenko. "Fatherland" was officially registered as a political party in September 1999, and began to attract the voters who had voted for Yevhen Marchuk in the October 1999 presidential election. In 2000, "Fatherland" went in opposition to President Kuchma.
Deputy Prime Minister for fuel and energy
From late December 1999 to January 2001, Tymoshenko was the Deputy Prime Minister for the fuel and energy sector in the cabinet of Viktor Yushchenko. She officially left parliament on 2 March 2000. Under her guidance, Ukraine's revenue collections from the electricity industry grew by several thousand percent. She scrapped the practice of barter in the electricity market, requiring industrial customers to pay for their electricity in cash. She also terminated exemptions for many organizations which excluded them from having their power disconnected. Her reforms meant that the government had sufficient funds to pay civil servants and increase salaries.In 2000, Tymoshenko's government provided an additional 18 billion hryvna for social payments. Half of this amount was collected due to withdrawal of funds from shadow schemes, the ban on barter payments and the introduction of competition rules to the energy market.
On 18 August 2000, her husband Oleksandr Tymoshenko, CEO of United Energy Systems of Ukraine, was detained and arrested. Tymoshenko herself stated that her husband's arrest was the result of political pressure on her. On 19 January 2001, Kuchma ordered Tymoshenko to be dismissed. Then, Yushchenko silently accepted her dismissal, despite her achievements in the energy sector. Ukrainian media called it "the first betrayal of Viktor Yushchenko". Soon after her dismissal, Tymoshenko took leadership of the National Salvation Committee and became active in the Ukraine without Kuchma protests. The movement embraced a number of opposition parties, such as Yulia Tymoshenko Bloc, "Fatherland", Ukrainian Republican Party, Ukrainian Conservative Republican Party, "Sobor", Ukrainian Social-Democratic Party, Ukrainian Christian-Democratic Party and Patriotic Party.