Dealing with Putin / Times Magazine 22.4.2022

Not for one moment, after Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, did Yuliya Tymoshenko think of leaving her homeland. “We didn’t know how it would go, but on the first day of the war me and my team decided we would stay in Ukraine and with Ukraine, and in no circumstances were we going to leave Ukraine. Nothing was going to change that decision,” says the former prime minister - she of the famous plaited golden hair.

Tymoshenko is also renowned for her ambition, but she immediately told members of her opposition party, Batkivshchyna (Fatherland): “Politics has ended in Ukraine. There’s no more government and opposition. From this minute we are supporting our president, our government and our armed forces with every effort we can.” 

Although she had been defeated by Volodymyr Zelensky in the 2019 presidential election, and had since opposed almost all his policies, she informed him that “we are one team and whatever services he needs we are ready to provide.”

Tymoshenko has been as good as her word. She has worked to evacuate sick children. She has helped supply food and medicine to frontline towns and cities. She has called western leaders to appeal for support. And she has travelled to what she calls the “hot spots”, to towns and cities that have become almost household names in the West thanks to Russia’s war crimes - Kharkiv, Donetsk, Chernihiv, Bucha, Irpin, Borodyanka.

What she has witnessed has caused her “huge pain”, she tells The Times in a Zoom interview from her office in Kyiv. “What I have seen with my own eyes is breaking my heart for ever,” she says through an interpreter who also happens to be the first deputy chair of the Ukraine parliament’s foreign affairs committee. “Nobody can go through this without tears.”

She talks sadly and sombrely of parents who had to watch Russian soldiers raping their young daughter; of a mother, fearful she would be killed, writing the contact details of relatives on her young daughter’s back; of seeing stray dogs gnawing at the abandoned corpses of Russian soldiers; of hurriedly dug graves outside ruined homes and apartment blocks; and of children having to spend weeks at a time in dimly-lit shelters with little proper food.

Visiting a military hospital near Kharkiv, she saw the shattered case of an artillery shell on the director’s desk. She asked if a wounded soldier had given it to him as a souvenir. “Look behind me,” he replied, showing her a large hole in the wall behind the desk. “This is part of an artillery shell that came without invitation into my office.”

But she also speaks of her immense pride in her fellow Ukrainians. “I have witnessed the massive heroism of the simple people,” she says. The armed forces are fighting heroically on the front lines. Other men are protecting their communities as volunteers in territorial defence units. Students are making Molotov cocktails. Children are painting pictures for their mothers to send to their fathers. “Every Ukrainian has chosen to fight on their own front line, beginning with the first missile.”

Never one to mince her words, Tymoshenko accuses Russia’s President Vladimir Putin - a man she knows well - of “the conscious, planned genocide of Ukraine”. She says he is waging a “full-blooded, dark, rational and calculated war” in order to build a new Russian empire, and “wants to erase formally our identity, our history, and our culture because for him Russians and Ukrainians are one people”. It is, she adds, “difficult to comprehend that what we see in front of us is happening in the 21st century in Europe.”

For the West, too, she has some harsh words. Ukraine is paying the price for its feeble response to Putin’s previous acts of aggression, she says. She is grateful for the sanctions it has now imposed on Russia, but they are not enough. The free world has to end its “policies of appeasement”. It must stop believing it can work with Russia, stop buying Russian energy, stop fearing Russian weapons of mass destruction and seize this chance to destroy Putin’s regime.

“We have a unique historical moment to kill and finish this absolute evil once and for ever,” she declares.

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Tymoshenko, now 61, may be glamorous, but she is also tough. In a remarkable career she has made a fortune and survived revolution, imprisonment by two different presidents, a suspected assassination attempt, hunger strikes, smear campaigns, the enmity of the Kremlin and the vertiginous troughs and peaks of Ukraine’s treacherous brand of politics.

Born in the industrial city of Dnipropetrovsk in the Russian-speaking east of Ukraine, in what was then the USSR, she was abandoned by her father before she was three and raised by a single mother. She was married at 18. Her daughter, Yevhenia (who was educated at Rugby School and the London School of Economics) was born barely a year later. Despite that Tymoshenko managed to earn a first-class degree in engineering and economics from Dnipropetrovsk State University.

In the final years of the Soviet Union, in the late 1980s, she and her husband, Oleksandr, took advantage of President Gorbachev’s perestroika reforms to set up a video rental business in Dnipropetrovsk. In the years following the Soviet Union’s collapse, when cowboy capitalism ran amok and proper controls were virtually non-existent, they parlayed that initial business venture first into the Ukrainian Petrol Corporation, which supplied farmers with diesel, and then into United Energy Systems of Ukraine (UESU), which became the country’s biggest importer of Russian gas. In somewhat opaque circumstances Tymoshenko grew immensely rich. She was dubbed the “gas princess”.

In 1996 she entered politics and was elected to the Ukrainian parliament. In 1999 she founded her own left-leaning party, Batkivshchyna. That same year she was appointed Deputy Prime Minister of Fuel and Energy, and set about tackling that sector’s endemic corruption until she was herself accused of corruption in 2001. She was held 24 days before the charges were dropped. She claimed her arrest was politically-motivated, and became a fierce opponent of the then President, Leonid Kuchma.

In 2002 Tymoshenko survived a mysterious car accident in Kyiv that may or may not have been an assassination attempt by Kuchma’s supporters. Then, in 2004, she gained global prominence through her leadership of Ukraine’s so-called ‘Orange Revolution’.

Kuchma rigged that November’s presidential elections to ensure that his hand-picked, pro-Russian candidate, Viktor Yanukovych, defeated his western-orientated rival, Viktor Yushchenko, who was mysteriously poisoned - and seriously disfigured - during the campaign.

When the result was announced demonstrations erupted across Ukraine. As many as half-a-million people packed into Kyiv’s Maidan Nezalezhnosti (Independence Square). Day after day, as the world’s media bore witness, Tymoshenko delivered fiery speeches and galvanised the protests until the Supreme Court ordered a fresh election. The second time round, Yushchenko won comfortably and appointed his ally to be Ukraine’s first woman prime minister.

Uniting against a common enemy was easy. Governing together proved less so. Within months Yushchenko and Tymoshenko fell out and he sacked her. In opposition once more, Tymoshenko adopted a nationalist, pro-European, anti-Russian platform. At some point she switched from speaking Russian to Ukrainian. Batkivshchyna performed well in the parliamentary elections of 2007, and Yushchenko was obliged to restore her to the post of prime minister.

Her rehabilitation proved a proverbial poisoned chalice. She and Yushchenko continued to squabble. In 2008 Ukraine was hit hard by the global financial crisis. In January 2009 Russia cut off gas supplies to Ukraine, and by extension to Europe, for 13 days over allegedly unpaid bills. Tymoshenko had to negotiate a new contract personally with Putin. 

Asked how she got on with Putin, Tymoshenko says their meetings were characterised by formality and distrust. “Ukraine was always under pressure from Russia and being blackmailed by Russia,” she says. “That was an energy war. Now we’re in a full-blown war.” For his part, Putin was said to have described Tymoshenko as “the only man in the Ukraine government”, and paid her the backhanded compliment of turning up on time.

In 2010 she ran against Yanukovych for the presidency, but by then her popularity was waning. She lost. The following year she was charged with embezzlement and abuse of power, and sentenced to seven years’ imprisonment. She claimed the charges were fabricated by Yanukovych to silence her. The Obama administration and the European Union protested against her incarceration, but to no avail.

Years later it transpired that Paul Manafort, Donald Trump’s presidential campaign manager in 2016, conducted a smear campaign against Tymoshenko on Yanukovych’s behalf. The aim was to discredit  - or “plant some stink” - on her ahead of the 2012 parliamentary elections by placing articles in the western media that portrayed her as corrupt and anti-semetic.

Tymoshenko remained in prison for three years, staging occasional hunger strikes, until Ukraine was rocked by another popular uprising in 2014. 

The so-called Euromaidan revolution erupted when Yanukovych, under Kremlin pressure, opted for closer ties with Russia over an association agreement with the European Union that had been approved by Ukraine’s parliament. Riots erupted, spread and escalated. Protesters seized and occupied  Maidan Nezalezhnosti. Scores were killed in clashes with the security forces. The uprising ended with Yanukovich fleeing to Russia and Tymoshenko’s release.

Petro Poroshenko, Yanukovich’s successor as president, duly signed the association agreement with the EU. Putin responded by forcibly annexing Crimea, and that was when the West made its first “strategic mistake”, Tymoshenko says. It failed to honour the security guarantees it had given Ukraine when it surrendered its Soviet-era nuclear arsenal in 1994. 

The West’s  response to Russia’s aggression was “very weak”, just as it was when Russia seized South Ossetia from Georgia in 2008. “Evil which is not punished has a tendency to return, and that’s what’s happened now,” she says. “It’s a price being paid by all of us, but most of all by Ukraine.” 

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In 2007 Tymoshenko met her idol, Margaret Thatcher, in London. She still keeps a photograph of their encounter, and an inscribed copy of Thatcher’s memoirs, in her office. “Be strong. Be strong for your country,” the former British prime minister told her. Tymoshenko has taken that advice to heart. 

She sees no room for compromise with Putin. He uses so-called peace talks to “fool everybody”, she says. They are “Putin’s instrument to ruin western unity, slow the application of sanctions, disorientate the people of Europe and fragment the Ukrainian people and army”. 

The only agreement he would sign would be one that mandates Ukraine’s unilateral disarmament and rejection of Nato membership. “If you put those two things together it means it won’t be long before he tries again to recapture a Ukraine weakened by diplomatic means.”

Putin would not stop there, she warns. He would be emboldened in his “ill-conceived historic mission” to rebuild a Russian empire. His next targets would be the Baltic states and the former Warsaw Pact countries of Eastern Europe. “We have to understand that this war isn’t a war between Russia and Ukraine. It’s a war between Russia and the whole free democratic world…it’s a story about their own survival and their own future.”

She is careful to express gratitude for the sanctions, weapons and humanitarian support the West has already given Ukraine, and singles out Boris Johnson for praise. “If all the leaders inside and outside Europe showed Johnson’s leadership then we would be fine.” 

But that is not enough. She says Ukraine needs more and better weaponry. She quotes Churchill’s message to President Roosevelt in 1941: “Give us the tools, and we will finish the job.”

She wants the West to impose “brutal, decisive, mortal sanctions that ruin Russia’s economy to point zero and mean Putin’s Russia can never again conduct military operations. That would be the moment the Russian people can change their rulers by themselves.”

Those sanctions must include a total ban on buying Russian oil and gas - “the rivers of blood financing Putin’s war” - no matter how great the short term pain. “European countries and the world have to learn to live without Russia’s energy resources.”

She also wants the EU and Nato to offer Ukraine immediate membership. “After the Orange Revolution the EU and Nato refused to take Ukraine as a member. There was this illusion that they could still somehow manage to live with Russia as partners, not enemies. There’s no reason to believe that any more. It’s impossible now.”

Tymoshenko does not rule out Putin using chemical, biological or tactical nuclear weapons inside Ukraine, but dismisses Nato’s fear that its direct involvement in the conflict could trigger World War Three.

“That fear is an instrument Putin uses against the West to intimidate it and prevent it from action,” she says. “We are seeing and have tested already the quality of the Russian soldiers and of Russian arms. We have seen how poorly the Russian army is organised…This is the time when Putin and the West should change places. It is Putin who should now be afraid of the West, not vice-versa.”

She remains confident Ukraine can win the war, even in the Donbas region. The longer it lasts the stronger, prouder and more united Ukrainians have become, she says.

Taking refuge from incoming Russian missiles in Khakiv, where most of the population speak Russian and used to be well disposed towards Moscow, she found the shelter plastered with signs proclaiming “Glory to Ukraine” and “Go f*** yourself” - the message that defiant Ukrainian border guards sent to Russian warships when they attacked Snake Island at the start of the war. 

“Never ever is Putin going to be met with flowers in Khakiv, Odessa or any other city in south or east Ukraine,” she says. He had achieved the exact opposite of what he intended. 

No interview with Tymoshenko is complete without a question about her trademark braided hair, which she once let down in the middle of a press conference to prove that it was real. “It’s the traditional braid of Ukrainian women,” she says. “It’s a symbol of strength and confidence. But in the present circumstances I believe it’s also a symbol of future victory.”