For some reason, my blog has been getting very popular in Ukraine recently- after the US, the second largest source of readers of my blog is coming from Ukraine over the past month, and all-time, Ukraine is the 5th biggest nation of readers of my blog. Why Ukraine?
Perhaps it stems from a post I wrote in January 15, 2010 supporting Yulia Tymoshenko for President of Ukraine. You see, I keep my eyes on a lot of different subjects (just in the last several weeks alone I have written In Praise of NASA's Curiosity Mission, About Black Friday and why Obama, Robert Frank, and Other Liberals are Wrong for Hating It, and about Teaching and Brain-Dead Liberal Students), and one of the nations that I've always been fascinated with is Ukraine. So during the 2010 Presidential Elections in Ukraine, I read about all the candidates (it was a three-way race- between then-current President Viktor Yushchenko, then-former Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych, and then-current Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko), and came out in support of Tymoshenko.
Tymoshenko ended up losing the race to Yankukovych. Via wikipedia, you can read what happened next:
...In the first round of the presidential election on 17 January 2010, Tymoshenko took second place with 25% of the vote and Yanukovych took first place with 35%. The two proceeded to the runoff round held on 7 February 2010 in which Yanukovych was elected President of Ukraine with 48.95% of the votes, Tymoshenko received 45.4% of the votes. Yulia Tymoshenko Bloc members immediately claimed that there was systematic and large-scale vote rigging in this run-off. However Tymoshenko herself did not issue a statement about the election until a live televised broadcast on 13 February 2010 in which she said that she would challenge the election result in court. Tymoshenko alleged widespread fraud (according to Tymoshenko, a million votes were invalid) and said Yanukovych was not legitimately elected.
...On 3 March 2010 the Ukrainian Parliament passed a motion of no confidence in the second Tymoshenko Government in which the cabinet was dismissed with 243 lawmakers voting in favour out of the 450 (207 against).... Tymoshenko resigned from the Prime Minister post on 4 March 2010....
...Ukraine's prosecutor's office re-opened on 12 May 2010 a 2004 criminal case against Tymoshenko on accusations she had tried to bribe Supreme Court judges.... Tymoshenko also claimed that she was told by "all the offices of the Prosecutor General's Office" that President Yanukovych had personally instructed the Prosecutor General's Office to find any grounds to prosecute her....
...On 15 December 2010 the General Prosecutor's Office instituted a criminal case against Tymoshenko, alleging that she misused funds received by Ukraine within the framework of the Kyoto Protocol. She was officially charged on 20 December 2010. Tymoshenko denied the money had been spent on pensions and insisted it was still at the disposal of the environment ministry and called the investigation against her a witch-hunt....
...A third criminal case against Tymoshenko in connection with alleged abuse of power during the 2009 Russia–Ukraine gas dispute was opened on 10 April 2011.[215][216] This case was labelled "absurd" by Tymoshenko. On 24 May 2011 prosecutors charged her in connection with this (third criminal) case. She was not arrested....
...Tymoshenko's trial (she was charged in May 2011) over abuse of office over a natural gas imports contract signed with Russia in January 2009 started on 24 June 2011.... On 5 August 2011 Tymoshenko was arrested for 'ridiculing the court proceedings'... On 11 October 2011, the court found Tymoshenko guilty of abuse of power, sentenced her to seven years in jail, and ordered to pay the state $188 million. She was convicted for exceeding her powers as Prime Minister, by ordering Naftogaz to sign the gas deal with Russia in 2009.] The judge also banned her from seeking elected office for her period of imprisonment (disqualifying her from participation in the 2012 parliamentary and 2015 presidential elections)....
...A 2001 criminal case on state funds embezzlement and tax evasion charges against Tymoshenko was reopened in Ukraine on 24 October 2011. Since late October 2011 Ukrainian prosecutors are investigating whether Tymoshenko was involved in the murder of Yevhen Shcherban. With that Tymoshenko was under criminal investigation for ten criminal acts; prosecutors have claimed she had committed more criminal acts. On 4 November 2011 the Ukrainian tax police resumed four criminal cases against Tymoshenko. She was charged for these cases on 10 November 2011...
You can see for yourself exactly what is going on- Tymoshenko is a pro-democracy former businesswomen who rejects the communist approach of keeping the masses poor while the elites proposer, and the elites manipulated the voting processes and the masses to win, and then turned around and have imprisoned her and likely will kill her while she is in prison. She's one of the good guys and deserves our support. Under Yankukovych, the President of Ukraine has assumed more and more powers and has acted in an ever more autocratic manner, demonstrating that he intends to centralize more power, freedom, and property under his control and his allies control so that they can live good live while the people of Ukraine are poor and taken advantage of. Equally before the law, rule of law, and civil-rights protections have been trampled on, investment in Ukraine has dropped off considerably, economic growth has staggered to a halt, and relations have fallen apart with most nations of the world. Yulia Tymoshenko is a political prisoner, and deserves the support of every decent nation and the support of the Ukrainian people.
For more information, check out this story from the Telegraph, or a recent letter that Yulia Tymoshenko was able to get out from prison and publish in the Wall Street Journal.
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