Ukraine's Tymoshenko transferred to prison to serve 7-year jail term

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Ukraine's Tymoshenko transferred to prison to serve 7-year jail term

2012-01-01 15:49:07 GMT+7 (ICT)

KIEV (BNO NEWS) -- Ukrainian opposition leader and former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko was transferred to a prison on Friday to serve her seven-year jail term, an official said on Saturday.

Tymoshenko, who was convicted of abuse of power, was moved from a detention center in the capital of Kiev, where she has been held since early August, to a prison in the eastern city of Kharkiv.

"Yulia Volodymyrivna [Tymoshenko] arrived half an hour ago in accordance with the order issued by the State Penitentiary Service. She is currently in a temporary detention facility," the head of Kachanivska penal colony in Kharkiv told reporters on Friday..

The transfer comes a week after Tymoshenko lost an appeal against the verdict. Representatives of Ukraine's intellectual circles, including social activists and writers, expressed outrage and signed a statement rejecting the court's decision, the Interfax-Ukraine News Agency reported.

"The authorities took a sadistic decision to transfer Yulia Tymoshenko from Lukyanivka detention center to a penal colony, which is even more defiant taking into account the fact that it was done on New Year's Eve," prominent Ukrainian writer Lina Kostenko and other intellectuals said in the statement, according to Interfax-Ukraine.

"It looks like they are cynically counting on the fact that people in their pre-holiday worries will forget about a person who knows how to be principled and consistent in saying 'no' to the mockery of the state and who has to pay for it today through being sent by Tsarist-Stalinist rule to a penal colony," they added.

Tymoshenko is serving a seven-year term for abuse of power in connection with a 2009 gas deal with Russia. She was accused of illegally forcing state energy company Naftogaz to sign a gas supply contract with Russian gas company Gazprom in 2009, which the state says required approval of the Cabinet of Ministers.

Tymoshenko has claimed her trial is politically motivated and an attempt by President Viktor Yanukovych, who narrowly beat her in the presidential election in February 2010, to bar her from future elections. The international community has largely condemned her trial.

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