Ukrainian Prosecutors Dismiss Charges Against Timoshenko

KIEV, Ukraine -- Prosecutors in Ukraine have announced that all criminal charges against acting Prime Minister Yulia Timoshenko have been dismissed.

Yulia Timoshenko

Timoshenko, who was appointed by the newly elected President Viktor Yushchenko on Monday, still faces criminal charges in Russia despite Yushchenko’s earlier announcement that they had been settled.

“There was no crime in Yulia Timoshenko’s actions,” Ukraine’s prosecutor general, Svyatoslav Piskun, was quoted by the Russian Information Agency Novosti as saying.

Timoshenko denied charges of bribing Russian military officials when she headed the Ukrainian electric power grid. She says the charges were politically motivated by enemies of herself and Yushchenko.

She also dismissed as a witch-hunt the charges of forgery and gas smuggling she faced in connection with her activities as the head of a private gas trading firm in the mid-1990s.