Ukraine opposition leader Tymoshenko out of jail
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Ukraine’s opposition leader Yulia Tymoshenko, sentenced to a seven-year jail term in 2011 for abuse of power, was released yesterday.
Tymoshenko waved to her supporters as she was driven out of a hospital where she had been placed under guard while being treated for severe back injury.
The release occurred about the same time the Ukrainian parliament voted to oust President Viktor Yanukovych and set an early election for May 25, after Yanukovych abandoned the capital but refused to resign.
The 450-seat parliament backed the motion by 328 votes, declaring Yanukovych unable to carry out his constitutional obligations.
It following mass defections from Yanukovych’s Party of Regions. Deputies stood, applauded and sang the national anthem.
Reading the motion to the chamber, speaker Oleksander Turchynov — newly appointed from the opposition benches — said Yanukovych had “abandoned his constitutional responsibilities, which threatens the functioning of the state, the territorial integrity and sovereignty of Ukraine”.
Deputies in the assembly stood, applauded and sang the national anthem after the emboldened opposition took control of parliament and parts of Kiev in another dramatic turn in the three-month crisis.
But Yanukovych refused to step down and denounced a “coup” by protesters even as his government appeared close to collapse as protesters took control of his offices and deputies voted to free Tymoshenko.
Yanukovych defiantly told a local television station in the eastern Ukrainian city of Kharkiv — a pro-Russian bedrock of support — that he would fight tooth and nail against the “bandits” trying to oust him.
“I am not leaving the country for anywhere. I do not intend to resign. I am the legitimately elected president,” the 63-year-old said.
Yanukovych said that “everything happening today can primarily be described as vandalism, banditry and a coup d’etat.”
“This is not an opposition,” Yanukovych scoffed. “These are bandits.”
A sense of an emerging power vacuum had gripped the heart of the capital a day after Yanukovych and his political rivals signed a Western-brokered peace deal to end the ex-Soviet nation’s worst crisis since independence from Moscow in 1991.
Key government buildings were left without police protection and baton-armed protesters dressed in military fatigues wandered freely across the president’s once-fortified compound.
“We have taken the perimeter of the president’s residence under our control for security reasons,” said Mykola Velichkovich of the opposition’s self-declared Independence Square defense unit.
Thousands of mourners meanwhile brought carnations and roses to spots across Kiev’s iconic Independence Square on which protesters were shot dead by police in a week of carnage that claimed nearly 100 lives.
The Ukrainian police appeared to retreat yesterday from their entrenched defense of the pro-Russian government by releasing a statement in support of “the people” and “rapid change.”
The country’s vast army issued its own statement hours later vitally stressing that it “will in no way become involved in the political conflict.”
The next test for the police will come today when a deadline expires for protesters to relinquish public spaces such as Independence Square — the focal point of unrest that Yanukovych sparked in November by ditching a historic EU agreement in favor of closer ties with old master Moscow.
Russia’s foreign ministry yesterday accused the opposition of “submitting itself to armed extremists and looters whose actions pose a direct threat to the sovereignty and constitutional order of Ukraine.”
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