Opposition leader’s daughter urges hard line
Yevgeniya Tymoshenko spoke to AFP in Kyiv in a phone interview from the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference in Germany where she met EU Enlargement Commissioner Stefan Fuele and Italian Foreign Minister Emma Bonino.
“We are calling for more radical action on the part of leaders of the democratic world,” she said. “Negotiations with (President Viktor) Yanukovych cannot be successful. We are still calling for Yanukovych’s resignation and early elections.”
Tymoshenko said that she had explained to Western officials that protesters were not “extremists or provocateurs” and “democratic countries should defend our struggle”.
“We need to speak to the authorities from a position of power instead of trying to seek a compromise that Yanukovych will never accept,” she said, in an apparent criticism of other opposition leaders who have conducted negotiations with Yanukovych.
“I will continue to fight for my mother because she is the main political prisoner of this regime … she is now considered a more dangerous enemy than ever.”
Tymoshenko was one of the leaders of the pro-democracy “Orange Revolution” in 2004 and then served as prime minister.
She is in prison for abuse of power but she has dismissed this as political revenge by Yanukovych.
Yesterday Tymoshenko’s party said that the Ukrainian authorities were considering the introduction of a state of emergency in a bid to break up the protest movement against the government.
On Friday, Ukraine’s SBU security service announced a criminal investigation into what it said was an opposition attempt to seize power.
“An announcement by the SBU is an element of a use-of-force scenario, planning the possible introduction of a state of emergency,” a senior official with the Batkivshchyna party, Grygoriy Nemyria, told AFP.
Weighing in for the first time since the start of the protests, the military on Friday urged the president to take “urgent steps” to ease the turmoil.
Arseniy Yatsenyuk, leader of the Batkivshchyna (Fatherland) party, told top European dignitaries on Friday that the use of the army against the protesters was “very likely”.
“This is one more element of planning the possible introduction of the state of emergency,” Nemyria said yesterday.
“The involvement of the army, this has not happened during the Orange Revolution. This is unacceptable,” he added.