Ukraine’s former premier Yulia Tymoshenko will be visited by her lawyer, daughter Yevheniya and party colleague in jail where she is serving her seven-year sentence.
Tymoshenko, 51, convicted in October for power abuse in signing 2009 gas deals with Russia, was transferred from a pre-trial detention to a female penal colony in eastern Ukraine on December 30.
“On Tuesday…. Lawyer Serhiy Vlasenko, daughter … Yevheniya and leader of the parliamentary faction of the Yulia Tymoshenko Bloc-Batkivshchina party, Andriy Kozhemyakin, will visit the opposition leader in the Kachanovskaya colony,” said the party’s website.
The visitors will give a briefing afterward.
Tymoshenko’s lawyers have said her health had deteriorated to the point when she could not get up from bed. Some media reports said she appeared in a wheelchair during the transfer but the pre-trial detention center authorities denied the information. She traveled in a comfortable mini-bus, followed by a car with her 12 suitcases, the press service of the state penitentiary service said.
The prosecution and imprisonment of the leader of Ukraine’s 2004 orange revolution has been broadly condemned in the West. Tymoshenko said she was a victim of political revenge from her long-time rival and now President Viktor Yanukovych who denied the allegations.
