Yuliya Timoshenko Biography

KIEV, Ukraine -- Until yesterday, Yuliya Timoshenko was known as one of the most charismatic and at the same time most offensive politicians in the post-Soviet space. Yesterday, a new entry was added to her biography – acting prime minister of Ukraine. Once known as the “gas princess”, who then transformed herself in the “orange Joan of Arc”, Yuliya Timoshenko now has every chance of becoming the first Ukrainian Iron Lady.

Acting Prime Minister Timoshenko

Born on November 27, 1960, in Dnepropetrovsk, Yuliya Grigyan-Telegina finished university in Dnepropetrovsk, graduating from the department of economics as a cybernetic economist. She found a job as an engineering economist at the Lenin Machine-Building Plant in Dnepropetrovsk. In 1979, she married Aleksandr Timoshenko, the son of Gennady Timoshenko, a prominent regional Party functionary. Their daughter Evgeniya was born in 1980.

The first critical event in Yuliya timoshenko's life, as in the lives of most of her compatriots, was the election of Dnepropetrovsk native Leonid Kuchma as President of Ukraine in 1994. The local clan's fortunes soared. Pavel Lazarenko became prime minister, and in 1997, Yuliya Timoshenko became head of the Unified Power System of Ukraine (EESU). Yuliya Timoshenko spent two very successful years as head of the Ukrainian corporation, making EESU a major importer of energy resources. Ms. Timoshenko enjoyed the president's trust and was considered Prime Minister Lazarenko's right hand; together with him she headed the Batkivshina (Motherland) All-Ukrainian Union Party, from which she was elected to parliament in 1998. She was elected in a single-member constituency in Kirovograd Region with a record 92.3 percent of the vote.

In 1998, Yuliya Timoshenko was honored with the church order of St. Barbara the Great Martyr – her own torments began later. The scandalous firing of Pavel Lazarenko and his flight to the US could not undermine her position. She remained a supporter of President Kuchma and worked well with the new prime minister, Viktor Yushchenko, a former head of the National Bank.

In 1999, Viktor Yushchenko convinced President Kuchma that his government needed a deputy prime minister for the fuel and energy complex. Yuliya Timshenko became that deputy prime minister. At that point, her relations with Ukrainian businessmen and politicians began to deteriorate. The deputy prime minister started paying the debt to Russia for delivered and stolen gas and fighting against defaults on payments, which antagonized most energy company owners. At the same time, the management at Russia's Gazprom was replaced – Rem Vyakhirev, who had worked well with Yuliya Timoshenko, was replaced by Aleksey Miller, who did not share his predecessor's personal sympathies. In 2000, she was dismissed from the post of deputy prime minister and arrested. The Prosecutor General's Office brought a criminal case against her, and she spent several weeks in prison on charges of nonpayment of taxes during her tenure at EESU. She was then released due to insufficient evidence. But Yuliya Timoshenko's first existence – a loyal careerist and businesswoman – had exhausted itself.

In many respects, Yuliya Timoshenko owed her rebirth in the role of people's tribune, revolutionary, “Freedom at the Barricades”, and “Ukrainian Joan of Arc” to her former patron and then persecutor, Leonid Kuchma. The image of victim of the regime the authorities bestowed on her served her well. It was Ms. Timoshenko who organized the first “Ukraine without Kuchma” action. Then, just before the parliamentary elections, she formed the Yuliya Timoshenko Bloc and entered the Supreme Rada (Parliament). The culmination of her opposition activities was the “Orange Revolution” and she found her true image in the style of Lesya Ukrainka (a great Ukrainian poet, 1871-1913) – the legendary hairdo with a braid around the head.

Viktor Yushchenko called her the “Passionaria of the Ukrainian revolution”: in fact, she, not the new president, played the same fiery role in Kiev in November-December 2004 that Mikhail Saakashvili had played in Tbilisi the year before and Boris Yeltsin, in Moscow in 1991.