Russian Institute for Strategic Studies

It will be remembered that it was Yulia Tymoshenko’s former fellow party member and a political teacher, so to say, Pavlo Lazarenko, who awarded her the title of an “outstanding opposition activist.” Several years later, in 2010, when the presidential campaign was in full swing, Tymoshenko’s chief rival, Viktor Yanukovych, acknowledged this point of view, saying that the role of an opposition activist was inherent to Tymoshenko and that she would be a very efficient opposition leader capable of getting in the hair of the authorities. Although somewhat sarcastic and revealing his superiority complex (he managed to score by 10% votes more than Tymoshenko in the first round of elections), these words were quite true.

Indeed, Tymoshenko was prepared to feel herself an opposition leader and work in opposition more than many other Ukrainian politicians. Eventually, each time Tymoshenko tried to break away from the opposition niche into the open of supreme authority, she, nonetheless, arranged this niche to make it comfortable for herself, trying to expand the opposition space as much as possible and change its routine environment.

While in opposition, Yulia Tymoshenko sang praises to herself and to her political supporters.

An abstract from Tymoshenko’s interview.

“The previous elections [parliamentary polls of 2006 – the author] showed: we are the power that will unite Ukraine. We won in 14 regions, and were second or third in the rest. It means that people in the majority of regions sympathize with us and pin hopes for justice on us.”[1]

“Whatever hard time our team and myself are facing now, I want you to know that I am not going to give up, I am not going to drop my job, I am not going to lose my heart. I am ready to travel this way. Today, when I was driving here, I listened to the speech Viktor Yushchenko had delivered in the European Square during the presidential campaign. This is what he said, I quote: ‘I vow bandits will never rule this country.’ He raised this banner and now he has hauled it down. And I am taking up this banner, and I believe all strong people of Ukraine will soon be under this banner.”[2]

“Our opponents are annoyed with many things, including our team’s skills to speak with the people. Everything is harmonious in our team and our opponents are shocked to see it... If it irks anyone to see that people love and respect me, I can only recommend these people to take it as a given. More to it, I promise that as long as I am in politics, this love, respect and confidence will only grow stronger.”[3]

These and many other similar pronouncements where the opposition leader speaks about herself in superlative degrees will be of little help for us if we want to understand the real opposition role played by Yulia Tymoshenko and the political force she led. For these ends, other sources will be much more useful. So, it is important to outline the typology, structural characteristics, chronology, and, what is most important, the core of her political activity.

Theoretically, several types of opposition activities are singled out based on classification criteria, such as:

-          political affiliation – right, left, and centrist;

-          ideology – socialist, communist, liberal, conservative, etc.;

-          attitude to the authorities – loyal or non-loyal;

-          degree of legitimacy – parliament, off-parliament, etc.

As concerns such criterion as the character of communication, the opposition can be classified as radical, reformist, revolutionary, or even false[4]. So, it looks an uneasy task to place Yulia Tymoshenko in such “multi-layer” typologies, since, first, she has gone through several stages of learning the “science of opposition”, and, second, she has always been sticking to the eclectic style of political conduct.

Yulia Tymoshenko’s opposition life is much longer than the history of her being in power. Over the 13 years of her political career– from December 1996 to December 2009 – she was in opposition for more than nine years! This period was topfull of events varying in the degree of importance and bringing about different consequences. It can be broken into several stages.

Stage one began in 1997 and ended in February 2001, when Yulia Tymoshenko was arrested and spent 42 days in a detention ward.

Stage two lasted till late 2004 – early 2005 and was crowned by the so-called “orange revolution.”

Stage three, the “post-orange” one, included her going into opposition from 2005 to 2007.

Stage four began with the presidential elections of 2010, when Yulia Tymoshenko lost to her rival, Viktor Yanukovych, and had to go in opposition again.

Each of these periods was characterized by specific tendencies, but all of them have certain common features that can throw light on the phenomenon of Yulia Tymoshenko as an opposition leader.

So, stage one of Tymoshenko’s opposition activities. Even now that many years have elapsed since then, her business career and certain facts of her personal life prior to her coming to big politics leave little room for doubts that she had opted for politics in a bid to sidestep possible criminal prosecution or even possible imprisonment. Suffice it to mention that even prior to the large-scale probes into the activity of the United Energy System of Ukraine, Yulia Tymoshenko had been “caught” twice – at the Zaporozhia airport and at Moscow’s Vnukovo airport – when she was trying to take undeclared currency out of the country. Back in the summer of 1995, the Tymoshenko couple was tabloid headliner number one: when the Tymoshenkos were boarding a jet bound for Ukraine’s Dnipropetrovsk from Moscow’s Vnukovo airport, they were found to have as many as $100,000 in their carry-on luggage, in a bag with bread and sausage. When the police were seizing the money, Yulia Tymoshenko was so nervous that she fainted. Notably, it was the first and the last time when she demonstrated such weakness. Ever since, she has never allowed herself to lose self-control (at least in the presence of others), even when kept in a detention ward for 45 days. Back then, in 1995, both incidents were swept under the carpet thanks to insistent involvement of top-ranking patrons. So, it was these blunders that prompted Tymoshenko to seek parliamentary immunity, according to observers.

Anyway, she made it to the parliament in late 1996. But she was rather a frightened businesswoman than a politically mature opposition activist. Her protest moods were rather vague and unshaped. It took time and more contingencies for her to evolve from a situation-dependent protester to a staunch opposition activist. At first, she was quite ready to change her status from an opposition leader to a top-ranking government official, should an opportunity turn up. Thus, despite her pervious violent criticism of Leonid Kuchma’s policy and numerous calls to impeach the president, she did not hesitate to take up the post a deputy prime minister in charge of the fuel and energy sector in December 1999. She stayed in office for a year, till January 2001.

When Yulia Tymoshenko won a seat in the parliament, the opposition niche there was occupied by a group of anti-government and anti-presidential factions, but all of them were leftist parties – the Progressive Socialist Party of Ukraine (PSPU), the Communist and Socialist Parties, and the Peasant Party of Ukraine. Unlike the notion of ‘left opposition,’ the term “right-wing opposition” was non-existent in Ukraine’s political landscape until the early 2000s. However, the center-right faction of the People’s Movement of Ukraine referred to itself as a constructive opposition. The party Hromada that won parliamentary seats somewhat later had called itself “non-left opposition” in a bid to dissociate itself from the People’s Movement of Ukraine. Lawmakers representing big and medium businesses, as well as officialdom, preferred to demonstrate their loyalty to the existing regime and never used opposition terminology.

However the cluster analysis of faction and roll-call voting at plenary sessions of the Verkhovna Rada in 1998 reveals a gap between these self identifications and the real state of things. In some cases, what party factions said about themselves only reflected what they wanted to be thought of them rather than what they really were. Thus, the “constructive opposition” represented by the People’s Movement of Ukraine turned out to be in the same boat with the pro-presidential and pro-government right-wing factions, while “non-leftist” Hromada joined the left opposition wing demonstrating opposition attitudes similar to those of the radical Progressive Socialist Party of Ukraine[5].

Nonetheless, adding their votes to leftist factions, Tymoshenko and her supporters sought to position themselves as a separate political force that had little in common with the others. But it was not clear what kind of force they though themselves to be, since both Hromada and later Batkivshchyna had been formed and operated as instrumentalist rather than ideological parties. This is why, depending on the situation, or maybe even on her moods, Yulia Tymoshenko called herself the leader of either a center-left or centrist party. Later on, when she was Prime Minister, Tymoshenko used to say she was inspired by the British politician and Conservative Party leader, Margaret Thatcher, and hoped to emulate such European center-right leaders as Nicolas Sarkozy or Angela Merkel. Addressing lawmakers at the beginning of her political career in 1998, Tymoshenko kept on saying:

“I am confident that common sense will get the upper hand. We are neither leftists nor rightists, neither are we conservatives nor radicals, neither a pro-presidential nor an anti-presidential force.”[6]

“We should not divide our society into socialists, communists, or supporters of the People’s Movement. All of us have a common goal – to build a normal, sense-ruled society. And if we set this goal, I am sure we are bound to reach consensus.”[7]

For quite a long period, she preferred not to affiliate herself with any of the political trends, seeking to be just a “normal politician,” a person of “common sense,” an advocate of “Ukrainian patriotism,” and a politician “caring for ordinary people” in the eyes of her voters. But outside the relatively narrow circle of her fellow party members, she was dubbed a populist, in the most unflattering sense of this word as a “lavish with promises politician seeking popularity through mob oratory, flirting with people and speculating in their expectations.”[8]

Political opponents accused each other of demonstrating populist approached in the worst sense of the word. In 2007, Ukraine’s former Prime Minister and a member of the Party of Regions faction, Anatoliy Kinakh, said Tymoshenko’s decree to pay a compensation of up to 1,000 hryvnias to people who had lost their money deposited with the USSR Savings Bank was nothing more but cynical populism[9]. The harshest words about Tymoshenko’s policy came from Viktor Yushchenko, who said her policy was “stinking, shallow populism of 1917,”[10] which was of little help in the time of crisis and for which she should be punished.

In turn, Tymoshenko, then in opposition, accused the Yanukovych government of “real populism,” especially after tariffs for housing and utilities services were raised[11]. Meanwhile, Tymoshenko’s supporters made shy attempts to rehabilitate the mere term “populism,” rendering it neutral or even positive connotations. However they failed to do that, as they failed to rid their leader of the populist label. Notably, it was Yulia Tymoshenko who scored the biggest number of user votes in the category of “populist leader” in a polling organized by the website Populizm.com ahead of the presidential elections of 2010.

Looking back on Yulia Tymoshenko’s statements of the mid- and late 1990s, it seems that she had really believed in the reformatory talents of the new business elite, where she belonged herself. It looks like she did think that accurate and pragmatic steps made by representatives of the financial and business community delegated to the parliament would bring about desired results. She really though that her parliament membership could help change the country’s political life. She thought that pooled efforts of lawmakers from among efficient top-managers were enough for that. “Corporate intellect with Yuila Tymoshenko’s face offer its services to the Ukrainian government to help conduct market reforms in the country,”[12] journalists used to write with bitter irony.

These inflated estimates of the political potential of the national financial and business elite revealed first signs of Tymoshenko’s growing Napoleon Complex. But this is not the point. As a matter of fact, they reflected certain tendencies in Ukraine’s political life of that period. According to some observers, the strategic goal of businessmen who came to the legislative bodies in the late 1990s was to change the economic policy and ultimately the system of power. Some even said that it was quite probable that lawmakers from among politician were soon to fall under the influence of lawmakers from the business community[13].

From the very start of her political career, being a member of the Pavlo Lazarenko-led Hromada, Tymoshenko had been learning radical opposition techniques. Thus, Hromada’s political demands included not only the change of the political leader, i.e. President Leonid Kuchma, but also the change of the political regime. At a party conference in July 1997, Tymoshenko accused the president of seeking to establish a totalitarian rule and announced plans to initiate his impeachment[14].

Another attack on the president followed in September 1998, when Tymoshenko initiated a signature collecting campaign to organize a nationwide referendum on no-confidence to the incumbent president and early presidential elections[15]. Later on, Yulia Tymoshenko, a lawmaker at the time, threatened to initiate impeachment procedures more than once. But because of the cobwebs of Ukraine’s law (impeachment procedures are not fixed in detail in laws, although such a norm is mentioned in the national constitution), such threats were just a figure of speech having no legal force. In any case, for a time being Tymoshenko was virtually obsessed with the idea of having Kuchma step down, by any means.

As for changes in the political system, the issue of introducing amendments to the national constitution was first raised by Pavlo Lazarenko, when he quitted the prime minister’s office and was the leader of Hromada. In the run-up to the parliamentary elections of February 1998, he said that his party, in a bloc with other political forces, would demand changes in the Ukrainian constitution to authorize the Verkhovna Rada to form a government, to vest full authority in the prime minister, leaving the president enjoy only representative capacities[16]. Back then, Yulia Tymoshenko also said she was an advocate of the idea of a parliamentary republic and supported relevant amendments to the constitution.

An abstract from Tymoshenko’s speech.

“Today, [in September 1998 – T.G.] there are no grounds for vesting the entire, uncontrolled power in the hands of one person who might lack high standards of morality or professional competence. That is why I am in favor of a parliamentary republic. We have elaborated amendments to the constitution, and the sooner the parliament has political will to adopt them the sooner we will be able to get rid of what we are now having in the country.”[17]

It should be noted that later on the issue of constitutional amendments was central to Tymoshenko’s opposition oratory.

In 1998-1999, the parliament was the key arena for opposition activities. Tymoshenko took effort to consolidate lawmakers, regardless of their faction membership, for joint action against the president and the pro-presidential government. Taking the floor at parliament sessions, she lavished compliments on the lawmakers and invited them for cooperation.

But these efforts were to no avail. And not because it was practically an unrealizable task to consolidate the politically heterogeneous parliament that incorporated numerous formal and informal associations (factions, groups and amalgamations). But mainly because representatives of big businesses who came to the parliament in 1998 were not inclined to be in opposition to the president, whose policy, by the way, paved the way for the rise of the Ukrainian business elite that ultimately came to power.

In late 1998 – early 1999, the Verkhovna Rada lived through a period of an explosive growth of new right and center-right factions and groups, which were formed from among members of parties that had failed to win seats in the legislature. Ukraine’ Constitutional Court cancelled restrictions on faction formation that had been imposed by the Verkhovna Rada on May 13, 1998. Under that resolution, only parties that scored at least 4% of the vote at the parliamentary elections were allowed to form factions. With this restrictions lifted, right-wing factions began to emerge in the Ukrainian parliament. These factions – the faction of Viktor Pynzenyk’s Reforms and Order Party, the Labor Ukraine faction, and the lawmaker group Revival of Regions (the cradle of the Party of Regional Revival of Ukraine that would finally be forged as the Party of Regions) – represented interests of various groups of the new Ukrainian bourgeoisie.  

It is worth saying that in the run-up to the presidential elections of 1999 parliamentary factions became polarized, with well-shaped poles in the “right-left” continuum and vague intermediate forms. The parliamentary center, which might have served as a basis for forming a pro-presidential majority, had no clear boundaries, was amorphous in terms of organizational structure and fuzzy in terms of ideology, since it used both rightist and leftist rhetoric. Inter-faction relations were characterized by a highest degree of confrontation.

Leftist and center-left factions could boast strict party discipline, collectivism, and in-faction consolidation. Their members demonstrated strong sense of party affiliation and tended to concentrate on humanistic aspects of legislative activity. Their opposition attitudes were realized in extensive criticism of the authorities. Their weak points included a bent for dogmatism and conservatism, confrontational style of politics and too much of opposition attitudes, which impeded wider involvement in decision-making, and mutual suspiciousness (leftist lawmakers kept a vigilant eye upon each other ready to expose any signs of pro-presidential attitudes should their colleagues demonstrate any). Populism was among their favorite political tools. But excessive social promises to voters grew into an intolerable burden, so populism developed menacing proportions.

Among advantages of rightist and center-right factions in that period were social-democratic ideology, orientation towards universal values and human rights. Advocates of these views were successful, mature people who had managed not only to adapt to the new conditions but had these conditions adapted to their own interests. But they too had their weak points – being self-centered people, they pursued corporate interests and lacked integration. Claiming to be elitist, they lacked party discipline, their program goals were rather vague and their actions lacked coordination. Moreover, they were constantly indulging in rivalry for leadership.

So, whereas left forces were a hostage of their liabilities to the poor and low-income, right forces turned to be a hostage of wealth and power.

Obviously, the character of Yulia Tymoshenko’s opposition moods (as well as those of her party) combined advantages and disadvantages of both leftist and rightist opposition. Trapped between the Scylla of anti-presidential left forces and the Charybdis of pro-presidential right factions, Batkivshchyna could side with both. And Batkivshchyna did this trick when it refrained, for a time being, from criticism of President Kuchma in December 1999 and delegated its leader to take the office of a deputy prime minister in charge of the fuel and energy sector in the Viktor Yushchenko cabinet.

Apart from that, in January 2000, Batkivshchyna supported the so-called “velvet revolution” in the parliament, which was geared to oust left factions and set up a pro-presidential right majority. Leonid Kuchma, who had won his second presidential office, was not going to put up with leftist opposition majority in the Verkhovna Rada. So, it was a key task for the president and the parties that backed him to change the in-parliament balance of forces without early elections.

To reach their goals, eleven factions left the building of the Verkhovna Rada to organize a parallel session at the Ukrainian House. It was there that they announced the formation of a new parliamentary majority, changes in the steering bodies of the country’s supreme legislature, the removal of Speaker Oleksandr Tkachenko and the election of Ivan Plyushch, a member of the executive committee of the pro-presidential People’s Democratic Party, as a new Speaker.

Notably, these procedures were far from being faultless from the point of view of law. Some observers even said it was a “velvet fraud” rather than a “velvet revolution.” Nonetheless, the left minority in the long run had to knuckle under to the rightist majority. It did not take long for the parliament to turn from a “territory of non-love” (as journalist S. Rakhmanin put it) to a zone of benevolent loyalty to the president and the government.

Batkivshchyna took a very active part in these processes, siding with the rightist majority. This twist helped Batkivshchyna considerably consolidate its positions in the reshaped parliament. It looked like President Kuchma had forgiven Tymoshenko, obviously reluctantly, for her previous pronouncements calling for “ousting the unprofessional, incompetent, venal and criminal authority.”[18] It was obvious that saying this she had meant the president. Moreover, Kuchma assented to the proposal of Prime Minister Viktor Yushchenko and offered the post of deputy prime minister to Tymoshenko, who, in turn, voiced support to the president and spoke in favor of amending the constitution to fix the norms of a strong presidential republic[19]. As a result, Batkivshchyna managed to consolidate its positions in the parliament – its representation in the Verkhovna Rada went up from 23 seats in May 1999 to 35 seats in March 2000.

Anyway, the period of Tymoshenko’s loyalty to President Leonid Kuchma was quite short. Relations between them began to worsen by mid-2000. Growing claims to Tymoshenko’s performance as deputy prime minister responsible for the fuel and energy sector provoked oppositionist moods in Batkivshchyna’s parliamentary faction. In June 2000, Kuchma came down on the government for “the organizational collapse of Ukraine’s energy system” and warned he would not let government members use the fuel and energy sector in their political interests. In September, Tymoshenko came under severe criticism for the gas deal she had signed with Turkmenistan for the period of 2000-2010[20].

Tymoshenko’s faction that officially was a member of the pro-presidential majority was feverish. Its members tended to side either with the rightist majority or with the leftist opposition, depending on the situation. In September 2000, Ukraine was shaken by a scandal over the disappearance of a critically-minded opposition journalist, Georgiy Gongadze, who had steered the Internet project for the protection of independent journalists Ukrainian Truth. In November 2000, a headless body was found in the Kiev region that was later identified as Georgiy Gongadze.

Soon, the Gongadze case grew into a high-profile Cassette Scandal, also known as Tapegate or Kuchmagate. The scandal started on November 28, 2000, when Ukrainian center-left politician Oleksandr Moroz publicly accused President Kuchma, Interior Minister Yuri Kravchenko and the head of the presidential administration of involvement in the abduction of journalist Georgiy Gongadze. Moroz named Kuchma's former bodyguard, Major Mykola Melnychenko, as the source. He also played selected recordings of the president's secret conversations for journalists, supposedly confirming Kuchma's order to kidnap Gongadze.[21]

Following the Gongadze case and the Cassette Scandal, Oleksandr Moroz’s Left Center group and Viktor Pynzenyk’s Reform Congress faction formed an irreconcilable opposition in the Verkhovna Rada. Some time later, it incorporated a broad anti-presidential coalition promptly formed by Petro Poroshenko’s Solidarity, some members of the faction of the Ukrainian People’s Party and the People’s Movement of Ukraine, and Batkivshchyna, which was then worried over the so-called Tymoshenko case.” These people voted to set up a commission to probe into the Gongadze case.

It was the end of stage one of Tymoshenko’s opposition activity. Looking back at this period, it should be noted that her efforts helped form the basis for an in-parliament opposition that could be characterized as “combined” opposition. In conditions of the transitional and immature post-Soviet political system and society, Tymoshenko and her fellow party members easily shifted from the right-wing to the left-wing positions, changing their views from pro-presidential to anti-presidential, in each particular case being guided by considerations of expediency and efficiency from the point of view of attaining their immediate goals.

As for opposition actions, they were carried out within the frame for the then political system with its institutional structures and were in no way revolutionary, or even radical. Instruments of opposition struggle included statements by Yulia Tymoshenko and her fellow faction members, party’s program documents, participation in the shadow cabinet, party congresses and meetings that adopted various party documents, etc.

Anyway, subsequent developments opened stage two of Tymoshenko’s opposition career, when her behavior changed dramatically. It was a period when Tymoshenko focused not on intra-systemic, in-parliament opposition but concentrated her efforts on the organization and leadership of mass opposition. From 2001 to 2005, the woman who used to be restricted by parliamentary rules and regulations turned into a warrioress, a leader of grass-roots street protest, a Ukraine’s darling, and an icon for protest voters.

It is worth noting that protesters against Kuchma’s policy took to the streets shortly after Gongadze’s disappearance. The first Ukraine without Kuchma action on December 15, 2000 drew 24 political parties and association, including the Socialist Party of Ukraine, Sobor (Assembly), the Ukrainian National Assembly – Ukrainian People’s Self-Defence, the Reforms and Order Party, the Ukrainian Republican Party, and others. The action was led by Oleksandr Moroz of the Socialist Party of Ukraine. Another member of that party, Yuri Lutsenko, was in charge of the practical organization of street protests (officially, he was said to be the coordinator of the movement). The protesters set up a tent encampment in the center of Kiev and demanded the soonest resignation of the president, the interior minister and other top-ranking law enforcers. The first action soon grew into an entire campaign that lasted for several months.

On January 5, 2001, the prosecutor’s office brought corruption and money laundry organization charges against Yulia Tymoshenko. Some time later, Ukraine’s prosecutor general ruled to remove her from office and President Kuchma sent her to resignation on January 19. Out of job and out of favor, the former first deputy prime minister joined the opposition. As a matter of fact, she had good reasons to do that, since having vacated her parliament seat to take the office in the government, Tymoshenko had to cede parliamentary immunity. She even claimed that offering her a top-ranking government position, President Kuchma had only sought to entice her from the parliament to make her exposed to criminal prosecution.

After the resignation, Tymoshenko, as a leader of the Batkivshchyna party, virtually burst into opposition, becoming a co-founder of the National Salvation Forum, which came into being overnight from February 8 to February 9, 2001. The Forum sought to be a grass-roots off-parliament civil organization capable of becoming an intermediary between the parliament and street protesters. The Forum formed a coordination council of 15 members, which included Oleksandr Moroz of the Socialist Party of Ukraine, Oleksandr Turchinov, Tymoshenko’s staunch supporter, and her future partners in the Yulia Tymoshenko Bloc (BYuT), Anatoly Matviyenko, Levko Lukyanenko, Stepan Khmara, and others. The National Salvation Forum proclaimed its goal in consolidating all political forces in Ukraine to overthrow “Leonid Kuchma’s criminal regime.”[22] The Forum demanded impeachment of the president and changes in the country’s political system to make it a parliamentary republic.

Off parliament, free from its regulations and ethics, opposition activists consolidated all their speechwriter skills and used their imagination to the full stretch to produce deadly evidence exposing the authorities and come out with bold calls. Thus, the National Salvation Forum’s Manifesto read the following:

-          the period of Kuchma’s presidency is a wasted time for the country;

-          his regime is turning into a dictatorship and tyranny;

-          Kuchma and his team are gravediggers of the freedom of speech and democracy;

-          the country is ruled by a handful of criminals who rig everything: the parliamentary elections of 1998 and the presidential elections of 1999[23].

The National Salvation Forum’s leaders were quite plain saying that they wanted a bloodless, “velvet,” revolution.

Being unable to have her say in the struggle to change the situation in the Verkhovna Rada (in her own favor, of course), Yulia Tymoshenko opted for the only right and the shortest, as she might have thought, path to victory and came at the head of radical off-parliament opposition. But this opposition was then far from being really grass-roots. However the Batkivshchyna leader had little doubt she would have all the support and backing from her party.

Now, it is hard to imagine what her political career might have been like but for her more than a month’s stay in a detention ward. Of course, it was a real trial for her, but, strange as might seem, this 42-day stay at the Lukyanovskaya penitentiary was a “princely gift” to opposition activist Yulia Tymoshenko from the country’s authorities. And she was wise and bold enough to use this symbolic capital acquired in a dirty, wet and cold prison cell with maximum efficiency.

She was arrested on February 13, 2001 on charges of illegal gas supplies in 1996-1997 and transferring about $80 million of bribing money to former Prime Minister Pavlo Lazarenko’s accounts with foreign banks. Notably, the arrest was preceded by years of investigation and prosecutor’s probes. Already in the summer of 1997, the United Energy System of Ukraine (UESU) was accused of tax evasion to a sum of 1.5 billion hryvnias and of having a $300 million debt for Russian gas. In February 2000, Ukrainian police launched a probe into the case of Slavyansky Bank owned by Yulia Tymoshenko. In August 2000, Tymoshenko’s husband, Oleksandr, and UESU’s former vice president Valeriy Falkovich were taken in custody. In November 2000, Ukraine’s Prosecutor General Mykhailo Potebenko said a team of Russian investigators was probing into a bribery case at the Russian defence ministry, in which Yulia Tymoshenko had been involved. The criminal case was opened in Russia on charges of improper use of funds (bribe-taking and overestimating Ukrainian goods supplied to the Russian defence ministry). Russian investigators visited Kiev to interrogate Yulia Tymoshenko.

Over those years, the Ukrainian Prosecutor General’s Office had submitted four requests to the Verkhovna Rada demanding parliamentary immunity be stripped off Yulia Tymoshenko. The parliament however refused to consider this issue each time. Tymoshenko then admitted that being under a threat of criminal prosecution for such a long time, she had been prepared, both morally and physically, to be arrested at any moment: “I was prepared for being taken to prison and always had a bag with necessary belongings on me, just in case.”[24]

Along with this legendary bag, she probably had a scenario of her conduct in case of a possible arrest, a script of her part to play while in custody, since such an energetic and enterprising person like her could not knuckle under to any circumstances. She behaved in a rather courageous way. But, to a greater extent, it was an ostentatious courage: it was meant to impress the world. And the world was impressed.

President Kuchma recalled that Tymoshenko had been arrested when he was not in Kiev. The first word he said when learning about Tymoshenko’s arrest was “idiots,” since he obviously sided with Mykola Tomenko who was quoted as saying that the opposition should be grateful to the one who had initiated Tymoshenko’s arrest. Kuchma could not but admit: “A martyr has emerged in Ukraine’s politics, and the clumsiness of the authorities only helped her.”[25]

Being paralyzed and disoriented by the Gongadze case and the Cassette Scandal, the president could only watch the rapidly developing situation around the Lukyanovskaya penitentiary and its inmate who won a worldwide popularity overnight. Ukraine’s human rights ombudsman, Nina Karpacheva, visited Tymoshenko in prison. Tymoshenko’s lawyers and lawmakers indulged in details of her detention and conditions she was kept in prison. Very soon, general public learnt that she was tortured, that schemes of her liquidation were being plotted (either through a feigned suicide, a hear attack, or food poisoning), that she was mistreated and that the conditions she was being kept in were intolerable. So, Tymoshenko’s pre-trial detention was depicted as an event of nation-wide importance and millions of people were closely following the development of this situation. As a matter of fact, it was a hardcore political show, which was another rusty nail driven into the reputation of President Kuchma. Each day Tymoshenko spent in custody was playing in her hands, enrolling ever more support for her and bringing down the ratings of the incumbent authorities.

As soon as Tymoshenko was put in custody, a protest campaign unfolded all over Ukraine (staged, of course, by Batkivshchyna and steered by its parliament faction) demanding her immediate release. In February-March 2001, photos of posters reading such slogans as “I haven’t broken down, and you?,” “Yulya, our sympathies are with you!,” “Yulya, your are our spring!,” “Our hearts and flowers – to Yulia!,” “Free Yulia Tymoshenko!” hit the headlines in many world media.

Tymoshenko’s release on March 27 was triumphant: she was carried out of the prison literally by hand, smothered in flowers. From now on, no one could challenge her reputation as an opposition leader and many of her more experienced fellow party members could only envy her authority among people. Her prison term might have impacted her health, causing anguish of body and mind but it cleared her way to charismatic leadership in the opposition.

Once freed from her second prison term in April 2001, Tymoshenko plunged into the campaign for the parliamentary elections of 2002. And here, the Batkivshchyna leader was faced with a serious problem: she had to ally with other political forces. Some words about the formation of the Yulia Tymoshenko Bloc on the basis of the National Salvation Forum were already said in the previous chapter. Here, I would only like to note that over the period of her opposition activities, Tymoshenko had learnt to appreciate support and take into account potential advantages of allied relations even with those who seemed to be poles apart from her.

Thus, a businessman who had contacted with Yulia Tymoshenko in early 1990s recalled that at that time she had sounded utterly cynical, using foul language in abundance and never showing any respect to any one she had known. People had been either useful for her or not. She had demonstrated irritation and disdain when speaking about nationalists[26]. Nonetheless, nationalist leaders were among the first to join her Bloc some years later. It was the nationalists who worked on her popularity in those regions where she used to have little influence.

But there seemed to be no “prisoners of conscience,” human rights activists or political prisoners, whatever respected they might be, who could offer her the support she needed to win the forthcoming parliamentary elections. Such support could come only from Viktor Yushchenko, the leader of the Our Ukraine party bloc and a respectable politician at that time, who had an overwhelming support in Ukraine’s western region, who was loved by the West and backed by the United States and the Ukrainian diaspora. He was the most desired partner for Tymoshenko and she tried hard to win his support. Tymoshenko confessed that she had had the experience of joint work with Yushchenko, when they had worked on the 1999-2000 budget. He was governor of Ukraine’s National Bank, and she headed the Verkhovna Rada’s budgetary committee then. “We had different views on relations between the National Bank and the government,” she recalled. “When we were trying to bridge this gap, we understood that we felt at home working in a single team.”[27]

I late 2001, Tymoshenko had at least two major strategic goals. First, she needed to set up a coalition with two political forces, Yushchenko’s Our Ukraine and Oleksandr Moroz’s Socialist Party, which had little in common with each other. Her second task was to form anti-residential protest political networks she could control. Both tasks were not very easy ones.

To achieve her first goal she needed different patterns of communication with each of her potential partners. So, she tried to “save” Yushchenko from excessive liberal views, to keep him from a deal with the authorities and existentialist conformism. As for Moroz, she did her best to cut him off the leftist camp.

An abstract from Tymoshenko’s interview.

“Some say Viktor Andreyevich [Yushchenko – T.G.] is, you know, a cunning Khokhol [a derogatory term for ethnic Ukrainians, as it was a common haircut of Ukrainian Cossacks featuring a lock of hair sprouting from the top or the front of an otherwise closely shaven head – translator] who is seeking to lull Leonid Kuchma’s vigilance to sweep the elections and hit the presidential jackpot. It is the most absurd allegation... A politician who seeks to blunt the vigilance of his open rivals by means of siding with them inevitably becomes a member of their team... Today, Viktor Andreyevich has an ideal chance and a potentially ideal team to become really free. Concessions, compromises or constructive talks with the authorities will never give him such freedom.”[28]

As concerns Moroz, the Batkivshchyna leader was worried over quite different problems.

An abstract from Tymoshenko’s interview.

“The trouble is that rejecting Moroz we are pushing him towards the Communists. He has no other choice. He needs to pursue the policy he deems constructive, almost social democratic... And we are literally throwing him out to the Communists...”[29]

Ironically, Tymoshenko pronounced such disloyal words in respect of the Communists shortly after she had stood “shoulder to shoulder” with the Communist leader, Petro Simonenko, in the Ukraine without Kuchma protest campaign.

So, it looks like Tymoshenko felt strong enough to realize her own vision of the political strategy, of the forms of opposition struggle and the nature of political alliances. After her prison saga, President Kuchma became her chief personal enemy and she had no other choice but to crush him down. So, any means were acceptable to have him step down. Naturally, political likes and dislikes of her potential allies mattered little to her as far as Kuchma’s resignation was concerned. The chief criteria she applied to enroll partners was their hatred towards the incumbent president and their determination to have him resigned. Oleksandr Moroz did have such feelings and determination, maybe even in abundance. But Yushchenko could hardly be dubbed as “Kuchma-hater.”

Moreover, on February 13, 2001, the day of Tymoshenko’s arrest, Yushchenko, along with Kuchma and Ivan Plyushch, came out with an address to the nation “over unfolding unprecedented political campaign showing signs of a psychological war.” The three declared “the unity of their positions and approaches,” their “commitment to rebuff political destructivism.” The statement read: “Not long ago, we witnessed the birth of the widely advertised National Salvation Forum built on no one knows which principles. The leaders of this motley aggregation, harboring grudges for their own political defeats and failures, are only seeking survival. Not for the state, not for the nation, but for themselves – they are seeking to avoid political bankruptcy and oblivion , and some of them are seeking to sidestep criminal liability.” The president of Ukraine, the parliament speaker and the prime minister pledged to repulse such attempts in the interests of the Ukrainian people[30]. So, evidently, Yushchenko was not among those who were meeting Tymoshenko with flowers as she emerged from the detention ward.

So, it must have seemed rather strange when Tymoshenko came out with an open letter to Yushchenko offering him to come to the head of the united election bloc of the National Salvation Forum, Our Ukraine and the Moroz bloc, which sought to win up to 50 percent of seats in a new parliament.

Till the very beginning of the election campaign, Tymoshenko kept on approaching Yushchenko with her proposal, in public and behind the scenes, enticing him into a promising union and seducing him by triumphant parliament perspectives. She spared no effort to cultivate “grapes of wrath,” to stir up his hatred towards the president, to provoke sharp words and radical acts. She wanted him to declare a war against President Kuchma, as she had done herself.

The content analysis of Tymoshenko’s speeches in 2001 reveals that Yushchenko’s name was mentioned much more often than the name of any other Ukrainian politician. But even then, when she cherished hopes for a long and fruitful union, when she lavished flattering words on him, her rhetoric began to depict him as a weak, indecisive, feeble and short-sighted politician.

“I did everything I could, and even more, to make this association come true. But Viktor Andreyevich chose another path – the path of compromises and deals with the authorities. And the latter let his bloc stay intact.”

“There are no grounds for the authorities to be afraid of Our Ukraine. It is good enough, polite enough, obedient enough.”

“I would want Viktor Andreyevich to side with us... But obviously it is not meant to be... Yushchenko has yielded to Kuchma. He might have been bluffed and scared by some incriminatory evidence the authorities are digging up against any politician... That is why, I think, he is coming closer to Kuchma.”

"Viktor Andreyevich is a man who is strongly influenced by other people's advise...Practically all people who give him advise have absolutely nothing in common with Viktor Andreyevich's interests, they have absolutely nothing in common with the interests of the country."

"I still believe that his love for Ukraine will get the upper hand over minute-serving selfish interests, over fears and his desire to be liked by all. "

"I wonder if he had ever asked himself what he was going to do when his new political team begins to save its face in eyes of the entire world betraying national interests like it is doing now. Self-abhorrence will be an atonement for conformism."

So, the "union of the three" (Yushchenko, Tymoshenko and Moroz) would never be formed because of these contradictions. Each of them opted for his or her own path to the parliament, not hindering however the canvassing campaigns of the others.

As concerns political networks (task number two), opposition forces continued their open-ended Ukraine without Kuchma actions in the run-up to the parliamentary elections. And though their potential was already exhausted and mass protests no longer expanded, such actions were getting on the nerves of the authorities and made it possible for the opposition to maintain an impression of grass-roots support. Moreover, opposition Internet resources (Grani, Ukrainska Pravda, and Maidan) were united into a single Internet portal Ukraine without Kuchma[31].

Nevertheless, before the elections, in 2002, even the most experienced and well-versed in Ukrainian politics experts were rather skeptical about Yulia Tymoshenko Bloc's potential. This Bloc was said to be in the zone of high risk and was not supposed to win seats in the parliament. Opinion polls demonstrated that the BYuT's ratings were from two to four percent (thus, according to the A. Razumkov Center, the Bloc's rating was 3.9%[32]). Experts expected that the BYuT's canvassing campaign would be flavored with scandals and its leaders would seek to challenge the voting results.

 But the actual results came as a surprise for many - the Bloc scored 7.26% of votes and won 23 seats in the Ukrainian parliament. Taken together with Our Ukraine, which won 23.57% of votes at the parliamentary elections (109 seats), they could potentially form a strong opposition force. But such a union between the Our Ukraine and the BYuT factions seemed impossible, since the former tended for compromises and represented moderate opposition, while the latter was a situational "pool of the die-hard opposition" (Yulia Tymoshenko Bloc, the Socialist Party of Ukraine and the Communist Party of Ukraine).

On August 24, 2002, the day of the 11th anniversary of Ukraine's independence, President Leonid Kuchma came out with an address to the nation, where he proposed a principally new concept of political reforms in Ukraine. It provided for: (1) the transition from the presidential-parliamentary republic to a parliamentary-presidential republic; (2) the introduction of a proportional (party) voting system to replace the mixed (majority-proportional) system; (3) and an administrative territorial reform[33].

Tymoshenko was skeptical about the presidential initiatives. She said Ukraine should remain the presidential-parliamentary republic but "with a very serious harmonization of the distribution of competencies between the power branches." She said it would be a grave mistake to support the parliamentary form of government, since "today's politics and the parliament are seized by big politico-financial groups that can use their money and their influences on the executive power and the mass media to manipulate the parliament."[34]

Now, Tymoshenko no longer sought a deal with the authorities, as she used to. Instead, she concentrated her efforts on measures to have the president step down. She said there were no point in taking part in the distribution of ministerial portfolios, since Kuchma did not need their (hers and Viktor Yushchenko's) standards (civilized, fair and open policy). Struggle for ministerial posts only "diverts the opposition from the only right goal - to hold early presidential elections as soon as possible."[35]

In September 2022, opposition media published Yulia Tymoshenko's "Open Letter to the People of Ukraine about Seven Steps to Common Victory." The letter called on people to come out for a nationwide peaceful action of civic protest that was scheduled to start on September 16 concurrently in Kiev's European Square and in all Ukrainian regions. The key political demand of the action was early presidential elections. To achieve this goal, each Ukrainian citizen was supposed to make seven steps (or at least one of them), according to Tymoshenko.

Step one - to take part in the civic protest action and stand up to the victory.

Step two - to persuade as many of one's friends and relatives to join the action as possible.

Step three - to stay in contact with people who circulated Tymoshenko's letter.

Step four - to place the action's slogan, Stand up, Ukraine!, at one's work place, on one's balcony or a car, i.e. wherever possible.

Step five - to provide informational or financial backing to the action.

Step six - not to believe a single bad word the authorities may say about the civic protest action or about the opposition.

Step seven - to pray to God "asking for support to people's struggle for real independence, for decent life."[36]

The action however died out, since it failed to draw sufficient number of participants. On the night from September 16 to 17, the tent camp of the protesters was dismantled. Oleksandr Moroz said it was a "colossal mistake of the authorities," "who cannot think because of the cask they are having on their heads."[37]

But the confrontation between the president and the opposition continued. On September 25, Oleksandr Moroz, Yulia Tymoshenko, Petro Simonenko and Yu. Orobets had a meeting with President Kuchma. The meeting however was of no avail: the president categorically refused to step down and that was the end of the talks[38]. The opposition announced another mass protest action – a Popular Tribune, this time[39].

Despite the fact that the Verkhovna Rada sessions were televised and Tymoshenko was literally the only one to take the floor all the time, the implacable opposition's possibilities were limited as far as the informational coverage was concerned, since it had little influence on popular television channels. Naturally, Tymoshenko never missed a slightest chance to be present in the information space but she had only a relatively limited segment of printed media at her disposal. As a compensation, opposition structures began to make an active use of Internet networks, where they were more efficient than the authorities. Apart from that, Tymoshenko had one more very important  resource - direct personal communication with people and she used this resource skillfully.

An abstract from Tymoshenko's interview.

“Since there is an information blockade against us in Ukraine, we are working with people directly. I have traveled each and every region of the country and I look upon this country as an organic whole, no West, no East. Moreover, being a national patriot, I myself, a person born in Dnipropetrovsk, share the ideas of those living in Western Ukraine. You cannot but feel elated when you see a sea of 30,000-50,000 people gathering in a square, when you speak to them directly and they put trust in you, you give them hope and they go home emboldened and heartened.”[40]

She was taking delight from personal psychological powers over people. She attached great significance to direct contacts with voters. Calling at the most remote villages, speaking wherever possible, she sought to build an illusion of her maximal closeness to voters, to demonstrate that there (allegedly) were no social distance or physical boundaries between herself and people.

After the parliamentary elections of 2002, the irreconcilable opposition’s efforts found extensive support in the West, so subsequent developments in Ukraine were unfolding under the so-called “orange” scenario.

Signs of increased activities of the U.S. administration in Ukraine showed up at the turn of the centuries, in 1999-2000. The key vector was directed at supporting the opposition, discrediting and weakening the authorities. The United States was behind Ukraine’s anti-governmental scandals and long-standing tensions around them. Along with the Gongadze case and the Cassette Scandal, alleged sales of weapons to Macedonia and alleged supplies of military hardware to Iraq were used to spoil the reputation of the Ukrainian authorities. In its annual human rights reports for 2003, the U.S. Department of State characterized the human rights situation in Ukraine as unsatisfactory.

In 2004, in the run-up to the presidential elections, the Verkhovna Rada formed a temporary investigation commission to look into allegations of foreign financial backing for election campaigns in Ukraine via non-government organizations sponsored by grants from foreign states. Well, a lengthy but very meaningful name. In its report[41], the commission said that direct official financial aid to Ukraine, which the United States and international organizations used as a tool to influence the political course of the state of interest, had been decreasing since 2000. It meant that the West was seeking to “punish” President Kuchma using financial tools. Thus, in the period from 2001 to 2003, the World Bank shrank its financial aid to Ukraine from $2.6 bln to $1.8 bln. Concurrently, indirect financial aid to non-government (in the case of Ukraine, opposition) forces, on the contrary, increased dramatically. By 2002, the United States had already re-oriented its financial support from the government and state structures to public organizations, political parties, election “transparency” and fairness programs, small and medium-sized business support and exchange programs. Foreign states focused their efforts on the work with those who shaped public conscience, i.e. with lawmakers, journalists, state servants, political scientists, heads of local self-governments. In 2004, according to U.S. Congressman Ron Paul, such financial aid reached $65 mln.

In 2004, there were 399 officially registered international organizations, 421 charity organizations enjoying international status, 179 foreign-sponsored offices of foreign non-government public organizations in Ukraine.

These non-government organizations were active primarily in four areas.

First. They worked with opposition parties and blocs and their youth wings (Our Ukraine, the BYuT, the Socialist Party of Ukraine).

The formats of such work included conferences, seminars, training courses, opinion polls. Tasks were to create grass-roots organizations, to develop election strategies, to train observers and election commission members, to render information support to the opposition bloc and discredit Ukrainian officials in the eyes of international community.

Second. They worked with local self-government officials allegedly to encourage regional independence but, as a matter of fact, to loosen their subordination to the central authorities.

Methods of work with local officials who supported Yushchenko included techniques elaborated by specialists from the European Institute for Democracy (Poland).

Third. They supported the mass media controlled by the right-wing opposition.

Since 2003, the program for the development of the Ukrainian media ($300,000) had been implemented in the country via the U.S. embassy. Kiev’s cable networks were monopolized by the company Volya Cable owned at that time by an American citizen. These networks were used to broadcast programs of the MBM media holding that incorporated Channel Five an Express Inform (owned by Petro Poroshenko).

Fourth. They sought to create new and strengthen the existing Ukrainian public organizations and used non-violent struggle tactics via these organizations.      

In this connection, I would like to note that Ukraine’s popular youth organization PORA (meaning in English It’s Time) looked like a clone of Yugoslavia’s Otpor (Rebuff) and Georgia’s Kmara (Enough). Aleksander Maric, the Otpor leader and a Freedom House consultant, who had shared his experiences with Kmara leaders in 2003, was detained in Kiev’s Borispol airport in December 2004. Being unable to enter Ukraine, he could not take part in Ukraine’s December 2004 developments personally but he and other Otpor consultants (for instance, Marko Blagojevic) offered their services as consultants via Freedom House. So, PORA had a perfect opportunity to use Otpor techniques to the full.

Among the most active U.S. organizations in Ukraine were the International Republican Institute (IRI), the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs (NDIIA or NDI), the Eurasia Foundation, the International Renaissance Foundation (Soros Foundation). These organizations were backed by the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). Some sources say that in 2004 the U.S. Embassy paid “monthly wages” to up to 3,000 Ukrainians. International foundations implemented projects in the area of political training, monitored the socio-political situation, offered technical and financial support to “independent” (i.e. opposition) mass media. The USAID coordinated the activity of missions of American non-government organizations active in the country within the framework of the Ukrainian Grantmakers Forum, which incorporated NDI, IRI, the Renaissance Foundation, the Solidarity Center, and Freedom House.

According to the above-mentioned commission, the annual budget of NDI programs alone was $2 mln in the period from 1998 to 2004.

During the 2002 election campaign, activists of the Committee of Voters of Ukraine (CVU), controlled by the NDI and sponsored by U.S.  National Endowment for Democracy and the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, the German and British embassies, had trained and organized the work of about 24,000 observers who worked at polling stations disguised as correspondents of CVU’s newspaper Tochka Zreniya (Point of View). Apart from that, the committee, using foreign financial sources, had organized the work of 225 observers who continued to monitor the political situation in the country after the elections.

According to the commission, NDI’s political technologies, that had been earlier tested in Georgia, included the organization of parallel vote counting (which gave the opposition a chance not to recognize the election results at all level), and manipulation of the public opinion to justify in the eyes of the world community mass disturbances they stir up to overthrow the authorities in a so-called non-violent manner.

The commission noted in its reports that the NDI and the CVU were working on a scenario how to exert international pressure on the results on the presidential vote in Ukraine and were plotting how to accuse the authorities of vote rigging in case their candidate failed.

Top officials of the NDI’s Ukrainian mission and the CVU struck an agreement on cooperation with the OSCE mission in Ukraine. The OSCE mission undertook to train 150,000 “election envoys” from the Our Ukraine bloc and 30,000 such envoys from Batkivshchyna and 30,000 – from the Socialist Party of Ukraine. These people were supposed to constitute the majority at all local election commissions and their reports on the voting procedures were supposed to be the key source for judging about the fairness of the elections.

Apart from that, there was an agreement to launch seminars to train observers at polling station. These seminars were to be funded by the NDI and special attention was supposed to be focused on signature identification mechanisms and on databases of supporters of the Our Ukraine bloc leader.

So, it looks quite logical that Tymoshenko was so concerned with the problem of attracting as many as possible Western observers. She demanded “one hundred percent international monitoring at each polling station, of each ballot box.”[42]

Along with supporting the Socialist Party of Ukraine and Batkivshchyna, the NDI began to work with other big parties and association which they had ignored util that time.

David Dettman, head of political parties programs at the NDI office in Kiev, offered his services as a apolitical consultant to head of Our Ukraine’s election headquarters Roman Bessmertny. Apart from that, the NDI planned to help Our Ukraine, the BYuT and the Socialist Party of Ukraine to work out a more aggressive canvassing strategy and recommended Our Ukraine bloc members to watch closely the developments in Georgia, since they were seen as a possible scenario for the Ukrainian opposition.

The NDI scheduled a series of training courses for Our Ukraine bloc members and a joint training for members of Our Ukraine, the BYuT and the Socialist Part of Ukraine. For these ends, it was planned to open regional training centers in four Ukrainian cities.                             

Non-government organizations from Germany, Great Britain, the Netherlands, Poland and the European Union carried out similar activities in Ukraine.

As is obvious even from a minor part of the Verkhovna Rada commission’s report, Batkivshchyna too