Crowds hail Ukraine ex-PM Yulia Tymoshenko

She addressed the crowds there from her wheelchair.

"You are heroes, you are the best of Ukraine," she told the vast crowd before breaking down in tears.
She was speaking after President Viktor Yanukovych had left the capital Kiev and MPs voted to impeach him.

But she warned that the protesters should not think their job was done. "Until you finish this job and until we travel all the way, nobody has the right to leave," she said. "Because nobody could do it - not other countries, nobody - could do what you have done. We've eliminated this cancer, this tumour."
Before she went into prison, her popularity ratings were dropping and many Ukrainians blame her in part for the chaos of the post-Orange Revolution years, or see her as a member of Ukraine's corrupt political elite.

The BBC's Tim Wilcox in Independence Square, reports that dozens of people he could see, walked away in disgust when she appeared on the stage, shouting that she did not represent them.

Ms Tymoshenko was freed following a vote by parliament on Friday demanding her release.
She was sentenced to seven years in jail in 2011 after a controversial verdict on her actions as prime minister.

Earlier on Saturday, she left the hospital in the eastern city of Kharkiv, where she had been held under prison guard, and flew to Kiev.

She told journalists at Kiev airport that those behind violence "must be punished", the Interfax agency reports.

On Thursday, the bloodiest day of recent unrest, at least 21 protesters and one policeman died.
Ukraine's parliament voted on Saturday to remove President Viktor Yanukovych and set an early election for 25 May, completing a radical transformation in the former Soviet republic of 46 million people.

The vote came after police stopped guarding presidential buildings, allowing protesters in, and parliament made new high-level appointments.
Mr Yanukovych said it was a "coup" and vowed not to stand down.
The opposition is now in effective control of the capital Kiev, with Mr Yanukovych in Kharkiv, near the Russian border, after travelling there late on Friday night.

The Interfax news agency reported parliament speaker Oleksandr Turchynov as saying Mr Yanukovych had been stopped by border police in an attempt to flee to Russia and was now somewhere in the Donetsk region.

Earlier on Saturday, protesters walked unchallenged into the president's office and residential compounds.
The glamorous, fiery orator who helped lead the Orange Revolution - Ukraine's revolt against a controversial election in 2004 - was convicted of criminally exceeding her powers when she agreed a gas deal with Russia which was seen to have disadvantaged Ukraine.

She has always insisted the charges were untrue, inspired by Mr Yanukovych, the man she helped oust in 2004 who returned to defeat her in the 2010 presidential election.

The European Union had demanded her release as one of the conditions of the EU-Ukraine trade pact that President Yanukovych rejected last year - triggering the protests that led to the current crisis.
European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso welcomed Ms Tymoshenko's release.

In April 2013 the European Court of Human Rights ruled that her pre-trial detention had been "arbitrary and unlawful", though the judges did not rule on the legality of her actual conviction for the 2009 gas deal.

They did not explicitly support her claim that her detention was politically motivated, nor did they accept her allegations of physical maltreatment and medical neglect in prison.

Labels: Conflict, Controversy, Ukraine

posted by Pieface @ Saturday, February 22, 2014