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Lawyers of Ukraine’s former premier insist on her medical treatment abroad

“If you look at it from the angle of view of national legislation, this /treatment/ is possible,” Timoshenko’s defender Sergei Vlasenko said Thursday

KIEV, January 31 (Itar-Tass) – Lawyers representing the interests of Ukraine’s former Prime Minister Yulia Timoshenko, who serving a seven-year jail term in a general penal colony in the northeast city of Kharkov, insist that their client be transferred for medical treatment to a clinic abroad.

“If you look at it from the angle of view of national legislation, this /treatment/ is possible,” Timoshenko’s defender Sergei Vlasenko said Thursday.

He quoted the opinion of physicians from the Charite clinic in Berlin who reportedly said that an efficient therapy for Timoshenko is impossible in the conditions of a railway hospital in Kharkov where the former Prime Minister is getting a protracted course of treatment for a multiple illness now.

“Germany medical experts also made known their readiness to give assistance to Timoshenko once she is transferred to a clinic in Germany,” he said.

“Since foreign physicians say it’s impossible to cure Timoshenko in full here, we’ll insist that she be given an opportunity to get proper treatment there where this is possible,” Vlassenko said.

“Right now that’s not an issue of health, that’s an issue of survival,” Vlassenko said.

He indicated that no legislative acts of any kind are needed for assuring Timoshenko’s trip abroad for the purposes of treatment. “What’s needed for this is President Viktor Yanukovich’s political will,” Vlassenko said.

He added that German doctors, who are supervising Timoshenko’s condition, are expected to come to Kharkov again within the next few days.

Thursday, Ukraine’s political opposition was making demands that a course of treatment at a foreign clinic be organized for Timoshenko.

Timoshenko, who propelled herself to political stardom during the so-called ‘orange revolution’ at the end of 2004, was sentenced to seven years in a general penal colony by a court in Kiev in October 2011 for an abuse of occupational powers she allegedly committed in the process of signing agreements with Russia in 2009 on the prices of natural gas imported by Ukraine.

She was later escorted to a penitentiary in the northeast city of Kharkov, where she was placed in May 2012 to a departmental hospital run by the national railways company. She is taking a protracted course of treatment there under the supervision by Germany physicians.

While in imprisonment, Timoshenko has organized several resounding actions or protest including a hunger strike.