Boycotting Ukrainian authorities or boycotting sports?
The European Commission and some Western politicians are intending to boycott the Europe football championship which is due to be held in Ukraine.
This is a part of their protest against the imprisonment of Ukraine’s former prime minister Yuliya Tymoshenko.
The Chairman of Poland’s largest opposition party “Law and Justice” Jaroslaw Kaczynski has even suggested to hold the championship not in Ukraine’s capital Kyiv, but in Warsaw.
However, the Chairman of the International Football Federation (more commonly known under the abbreviation FIFA) Joseph Blatter does not back the idea of boycotting the championship.
“When talking about the European Championship, politicians should reflect and consider the consequences of their decisions,” Mr. Blatter says. “First of all, politicians will have to keep in mind sporting values.”
Russian Minister of Sports Vitaly Mutko agrees with this.
“By their attempts to boycott the Ukrainian authorities, the West is in fact boycotting sports,” he says.
The scandal broke out when Ms. Tymoshenko’s supporters, referring to her own words, said that when the guards were taking her from a prison camp to a hospital, they allegedly tied her up by the hands and the legs and pulled her on a bed sheet. Besides, they allegedly hit her in the stomach so hard that she fainted. As a response to such cruel treatment, Ms. Tymoshenko filed in a complaint on her guards and went on a hunger strike.
Meanwhile, Ukraine’s authorities denied that any violence has been used against Ms. Tymoshenko. Ukraine’s Prosecutor General Victor Pshonka says:
“No facts which Ms. Tymoshenko described in her complain are true. She even named the wrong date of her being taken to hospital.”
Mr. Pshonka also added that there are no grounds to be concerned about the health of Ukraine’s former prime minister.
“She is on a hunger strike, but she drinks water and juices, and she feels quite well,” he said.
However, Yuliya Tymoshenko’s lawyer Sergey Vlasenko disagrees with this:
“I am not a doctor, but I can say that currently, Ms. Tymoshenko is very weak,” he says. “Friday was the 15th day of her hunger strike. Her lawyers and her supporters have visited her several times in her cell. She was so week that she could hardly walk. She only lay and drank water. She looked very thin.”
On Friday, Ms. Tymosheko agreed to be treated by a doctor from the Charite clinic in Berlin, who will come to the Ukrainian city of Kharkov on May 8. The Ukrainian authorities have allowed Ms. Tymoshenko to leave the prison camp for the hospital.
On October 11, 2011, a court in Ukraine’s capital Kyiv sentenced Yuliya Tymoshenko to 7 years of prison for abuse of power which she allegedly committed as the country’s prime minister.
In 2009, Ms. Tymoshenko visited Moscow and signed a number of contracts between the Ukrainian oil and gas company Nafogaz and the Russian gas giant Gazprom. The current authorities of Ukraine accuse Ms. Tymoshenko of making this step without informing the country’s then president Victor Yuschenko about it. Moreover, they claim that the documents, which Naftogaz and Gazporom signed then, allegedly contained certain juridical mistakes.
When the Ukrainian court announced its sentence on Ms. Tymoshenko, Russia’s President Dmitry Medvedev said: “The court’s decision is Ukraine’s internal affair. However, I would like to call on Ukrainian politicians not to add an anti-Russian “flavor” to this case. I can confirm that while signing these documents, Gazprom acted strictly within both Russian and Ukrainian laws.”
Vladimir Putin, who will become Russia’s president in 2 days, and who is currently the prime minister, also says:
“Russian lawyers had thoroughly checked these documents before Gazprom and Naftogaz signed them. They haven’t found anything illegal in them, either from the point of view of Russian laws, or from the point of view of Ukrainian ones.”
Western politicians may callon people to boycott the football championship in Ukraine – but they cannot ban people from coming to it. The German Chancellor Angela Merkel, for example, has strongly recommended the ministers of her cabinet not to go to this championship. But she cannot ban common German football fans from going to it – the more so because many of them have already bought tickets.
As for Ukraine’s authorities, they seem to prefer ignoring the boycott. Ukraine is still preparing for the championship and hopes that it will be held at a due level.