Yuliya Timoshenko

Batkivshchyna Party leader Yulia Timoshenko near PG's office in Kiev, on Thursday, January 27, 2011. Batkivshchyna Party leader Yulia Timoshenko has announced that the Prosecutor General’s Office has charged her with abuse of office in connection with the purchase of specialized Opel Combo medical vehicles. "Today they fabricated yet another criminal charge against me because I helped poor villages where there is no doctor or nurse by giving them special vehicles that can bring a doctor or nurse to villages where people live 10 to 30 km from the closest medical facility," Yulia Timoshenko told journalists today after her latest visit to the Prosecutor General’s Office. Yulia Timoshenko explained that this program was part of her government’s efforts to reduce the high mortality rates in rural areas of Ukraine. "According to statistics, 60% of people who die in the villages die not because they’re deathly ill, but because a doctor can’t reach them in time, because there is no transportation in the villages and no way for a doctor or nurse to reach the sick. That’s why we used state guarantees to purchase 1,000 vehicles for 3,000 villages that helped save more than 100,000 lives in 2010 alone," she emphasized. Yulia Timoshenko believes that her government’s spending on social issues can’t compare with public expenditures by Viktor Yanukovich’s team for their own personal needs. "To save hundreds of thousands of people we spent 12.5 million euros on vehicles; meanwhile, one helicopter for Yanukovich, to bring him from Mezhyhirya to work, costs 17 million euros. I am now being charged with a crime because they claim that I didn’t have the right to purchase these vehicles for the villages because in their opinion they weren’t equipped properly," she said. "This is purely a criminal act against me. There are no grounds for it. I was given a resolution saying that a criminal case has been opened against me, which was written hastily and poorly, and contains no elements of a crime – nothing. We will prove to the world and Ukrainian society and this is all political repression," Yulia Timoshenko concluded. Photo by Aleksandr Prokopenko / POOL / UNIAN