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Kiev court to continue trial of Ukraine’s exp prime minister

The sentence may be adjudged in ten days

KIEV, September 30 (Itar-Tass) —— Kiev's Pechora district court on Friday will continue the trial of Ukraine’s former Prime Minister Yulia Timoshenko, the leader of the Batkivshchina (Fatherland) party. The parties to the trial will continue their arguments.

Timoshenko is accused of exceeding her authority when signing gas supply contracts with Russia in January 2009. On Tuesday, the prosecutor asked the court to sentence her to seven years in prison. On Thursday, Timoshenko delivered a long speech and refuted all accusations.

In her speech, Timoshenko said that while signing the gas contracts with Russia she had “not ceded an inch of the Ukrainian land, not a single hrivna from the budget.” In her words, in case of another gas war with Russia she would have signed the same contracts. “It was a crisis. If today, Heaven forbid, the situation were like that, I would have acted in the same way using my constitutional competences to steadily get the country out of crisis,” she stressed. She said she did not hope for a fair sentence. “The sentence is ready and it will be a guilty sentence,” she said. “It is a classical example of the Lynch law – there is a group of men who have one illegal mission to make short work of a person,” she maintained.

The sentence may be adjudged in ten days.