Ukraine president tells EU to keep off Tymoshenko case

By Thomas Grove and Pavel Polityuk

KYIV (Reuters) – Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovich said the European Union should stop meddling in the fate of his rival, former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, and that her imprisonment should not hinder Kyiv’s integration with Europe.

Pouring scorn on the woman who helped engineer the 2004-5 Orange Revolution that thwarted his first bid at the presidency, Yanukovich said she was part of a ring of criminals and that her fate should lie in the hands of Ukrainian judges.

Tymoshenko’s jailing symbolised what Brussels has called Kyiv’s use of selective justice and Yanukovich’s comments effectively dismissed the EU’s intense diplomatic efforts, in which he has participated, to secure her release.

Yanukovich has promised to attend an EU summit this week despite his sudden decision to walk away from a landmark deal with the bloc.

His trip to the summit in the Lithuanian capital Vilnius may be an attempt to soothe domestic outrage that has sparked pro-EU demonstrations. Or he may be signalling a willingness to focus on Ukraine’s economic ties with the EU without making any political commitments.

But his comments over Tymoshenko are sure to cause tension with EU leaders in Vilnius – most likely at a dinner on Thursday, particularly with German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

“The issue of Yulia Tymoshenko should not be a hindrance to Ukraine’s European integration,” Yanukovich said in an interview broadcast on Wednesday, but filmed late on Tuesday.

“The (Ukrainian) courts, which she has been evading and thereby obstructing justice, should give the answer. What does the European Union have to do with this? Is the European Union a court?” he asked.

Germany was to have accepted Tymoshenko for treatment for chronic back trouble under a compromise which was being put together by a two-man EU humanitarian mission. This has now died along with the planned signing of Ukraine’s deal with the EU.

Clinching the EU free trade pact, which Polish President Bronislaw Komorowski said was thwarted by Russian ‘blackmail and pressure’, would have marked a definitive turn towards the West for Kyiv and away from its former Soviet master Moscow.

ZERO-SUM GAME

The European Union has accused Russia, which wants Kyiv to become a member of its own post-Soviet Customs Union, of pressuring Kyiv into walking away from the EU deal.

The EU says the association agreement was not a zero-sum game, though both Brussels and Moscow say Kyiv could not be in a European free trade zone and the Customs Union simultaneously.

Speaking at a news conference, Merkel said Germany, one of Russia’s biggest trading partners, could play a role in helping Moscow abandon what she called Cold War thinking.

“We have a structural problem, which is that moves towards Europe are viewed for now in Russia as a rejection of Russia, and we must overcome this ‘either/or’ mentality,” she said.

“We must get over the last relics of the Cold War.”

Russia has said it was using no more economic leverage over Ukraine than the EU was to bring Kyiv closer to the European bloc and that Ukraine’s decision to suspend ties for now was a “solely sovereign and internal affair”.

A Russian deputy prime minister, Dmitry Rogozin, kept up pressure on Ukraine, saying its integration with the EU would endanger joint defence projects because, as he said, the agreement of association would bring Kyiv closer to NATO.

“An association with the European Union is a way primarily to NATO and only then to the EU,” Interfax reported him saying.

“If Ukraine concludes an association agreement with the EU, there can be no talk of any (defence) contracts.”

Tymoshenko, whose jailing on abuse of power charges sparked criticism at home and abroad, is on hunger strike over Kyiv’s decision to renew economic ties with Russia.

Yanukovich held his fire over Tymoshenko during Ukraine’s negotiations with the EU, but on Wednesday he said she and her “criminal activities” were to blame in part for the state of the country’s troubled economy.

Tymoshenko brokered Ukraine’s negotiations with Russia that force Kyiv to pay around $400 a month per 1,000 cubic metre of Russian gas, above the $385 average Western Europe pays.

“Today because of Tymoshenko, Ukraine is paying off debts to Russia,” he said. “Friends of Tymoshenko are sitting in various prisons in various countries around the world,” he said, in a reference to former Prime Minister Pavlo Lazarenko who was accused of money laundering in the United States.

He served his sentence but is still in detention in the United States over immigration issues.

ECONOMIC LEVERAGE

Ukraine, which must find more than $17 billion next year to meet Russian gas bills and debt repayments, including $3.7 billion to the International Monetary Fund, has said Europe’s financial aid offer to Kyiv was ‘humiliating’.

Ukraine’s sovereign foreign debt has accumulated to more than $26 billion, or more than 16 percent of its $160 billion GDP in 2012.

In the Polish daily Gazeta Wyborcza, Komorowski, the Polish president, said Russia had exploited Ukraine’s short-term economic weaknesses to keep it within its orbit, adding to tough statements directed at the Kremlin from various EU officials.

“The problem is the policy of pressure and blackmail employed towards Ukraine by its eastern neighbour,” he said.

Russia has extended numerous loans to Ukraine over the years and tensions over its unpaid gas debts to Moscow have eased since Kyiv announced it was abandoning the EU agreement.

Russia ships around a half its gas exports via Ukraine to Europe, where it meets a quarter of gas needs. Gas rows sparked the disruption of onward supplies of gas to Europe in the winters of 2006 and 2009.

Thousands of people kept up protests in Kyiv against the decision of Yanukovich’s government to suspend the signing of the EU deal.

“We know that Russia holds nothing for us. We cannot allow Putin’s Russia to be our future. We will continue to come out on the streets to let our leadership know our place is in Russia,” said Igor Panin, 31, an entrepreneur who travelled from his home city of Poltava to demonstrate in Kyiv.

Protesters gathered outside the main government building during a cabinet meeting as hundreds of riot police stood by.

(Additional reporting by Alexandra Hudson in Berlin, Writing by Thomas Grove, editing by Jon Boyle)