KIEV, January 11 (Itar-Tass) – Ukraine’s former Prime Minister Julia Timoshenko, who is serving a seven-year jail term in a penal colony in the city of Kharkov and is simultaneously taking a protracted course of medical treatment at a Kharkov hospital, refuses to return to her hospital ward and spends nights on a metal trestle-bed in the corridor, her lawyer Alexander Plakhotnyuk claimed at a news briefing Friday.
“Yulia Vladimirovna /second word being Timoshenko’s patronymic – Itar-Tass/ continues a civil disobedience action,” he said. “She staunchly refuses to enter the medical prison ward where three active video cameras are still installed and where guards are still present.”
“Instead of removing the video cameras, the penitentiary service has offered Timoshenko a metal trestle-bed in front of the bathroom,” Plakhotnyuk said adding that his client did not refuse to take medical treatment s·ances.
He indicated however that “no s·ances have been given” since the start of civil disobedience “since it’s impossible to take them in the conditions where the former Prime Minister has found herself.”
For the third day running, Timoshenko does not give an opportunity to the guards to frisk herself.
Timoshenko declared the start of a civil disobedience action January 8. Gennady Tyurin, the Prosecutor of the Kharkov region said the next day her action was illegal and unlawful.
“I’m deeply convinced that the act of disobedience is Yulia Vladimirovna’s whim,” he said. “It aims to form an erroneous public opinion that violations of some sort were committed here.”
“The second objective is to drag out the judiciary process, to prolong the stay at hospital and to do everything in her power to weaken the regime of her conviction,” Tyurin said.
Timoshenko is serving a seven-year jail term at a penal colony in Kharkov for an abuse of occupational powers in the course of signing a Ukrainian-Russia agreement on supplies of natural gas to Ukraine at the beginning of 2009.