Two weeks in the dark
Previously, accused Yulia Tymoshenko vainly asked for one or two days of recess she needed to look through the materials. Now the judge Rodion Kirieiev has shown a bit of generosity and postponed the session for two weeks till September 27. According to the official information, he has allocated the extra time to prepare for the debates. The media, experts, politicians and Yulia Tymoshenko expected the sentence to be announced this Friday. However, the sentence is put off till October.
How this decision of the judge Kirieiev should be explained? Why has he suddenly shown so much regard towards the accused? The barrister Plakhotniuk thinks that they announced a recess in the session because “something had happened” outside the court.
“Obviously, it had been prepared beforehand. He came to the courtroom with the ready decision, though neither the prosecutor general, nor his other assistants were ready for this,” member of the BYUT Ostap Semerak told The Day.
The experts attribute this judicial somersault to the international visits of the Ukrainian government. First of all, Viktor Yanukovych is going to the UNO session to New York on September 19. Shortly, the Lyvadia Palace in Yalta will host the eighth annual meeting “Ukraine and the World: Common Challenges, Common Future.” The important European visitors such as European Commissioner for Enlargement and European Neighborhood Policy Stefan Fuele are expected to come. Probably, they have postponed the session so that the Europeans who will come to Kyiv could not see or read anything, come to the court or do homage to Tymoshenko in person.
Finally, at the end of September Warsaw will host the summit “Eastern Partnership” and the result of this meeting is important for “the European prospects” of Ukraine.
The recent declaration made by Bronislaw Komorowski should not be neglected either. The Polish President has indirectly confirmed that Yanukovych and his environment are involved into Tymoshenko’s process, though they refuse to have anything to do with it… “After my conversation with President Yanukovych I have the limited yet grounded optimistic view at the development of Tymoshenko’s process,” Komorowski said.
However, the political expert Viktor Nebozhenko has quite a pessimistic view: “Kirieiev’s decision is an international variant; it is not for the internal use. I think that the political question about Tymoshenko’s imprisonment has already been resolved. Nothing special happened. Two weeks will quickly pass and Kirieiev will announce his terrible sentence. However, we will be able to tell the West: we have fulfilled the procedure. Even more than we had to. The other thing is that these two weeks in the dark are very hard for Tymoshenko. This is a kind of political and moral sadism from the Party of Regions.”
Meanwhile, Yulia Tymoshenko has been taken back to the Lukianivska pre-trial prison under the flower fire (some of the activists threw flowers into the car for prisoners).
