Turning the pages back... January 30, 2005 (01/29/06)

Turning the pages back...

January 30, 2005

One year ago, in our issue dated January 30, 2005, we reported that, the day after he was sworn in, President Viktor Yushchenko of Ukraine nominated the fiery 44-year-old politician Yulia Tymoshenko as acting prime minister. "I'm up to the task of the prime minister's job," Ms. Tymoshenko told the media on January 25.

Mr. Yushchenko's office announced the decision while the president was in Moscow on his first trip abroad. "Tymoshenko, of all the candidates that were proposed, was the most acceptable," President Yushchenko said after a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin, "I hope that Yulia and her Cabinet will be successful."

Ms. Tymoshenko was the most visible of Mr. Yushchenko's allies in the Orange Revolution. Side-by-side with Mr. Yushchenko, and more than anyone else, Ms. Tymoshenko was the political face of the mass movement dubbed the Orange Revolution when tens of thousands of opposition supporters flooded the streets of Kyiv following the fraud-marred presidential run-off of November 21, 2004, wrote correspondent Olga Nuzhinskaya in The Weekly.

"I strongly helped the revolution ... I managed to demonstrate that politicians sometimes serve the people, not themselves," Ms. Tymoshenko said.

The charismatic Ms. Tymoshenko, who was considered to be the most radical person among Mr. Yushchenko's allies, was someone that almost no one felt neutral about. Nonetheless, Verkhovna Rada Chairman Volodymyr Lytvyn said repeatedly that lawmakers would support any candidate proposed by Mr. Yushchenko.

Source: "Tymoshenko tapped as prime minister," by Olga Nuzhinskaya, The Ukrainian Weekly, January 30, 2005, Vol. LXXIII, No. 5.

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