Russian President Vladimir Putin is seeking to recreate the Soviet Union, an aspiration that also threatens Central and Eastern Europe, Ukraine’s former prime minister said.
Yulia Tymoshenko's remarks, made in an interview with Current Time, were some of the most extensive comments she’s made since Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24..
“Vladimir Putin deeply believes that he has a historic mission to recreate the Soviet Union,” she said in the interview published on April 1. “To return European countries to some past century with all those aspects of prison that were part of the Soviet Union.”
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“And his sense of his ‘historic mission’ is so deep that he is ready to achieve this not only politically, but also economically, using the energy tools that he has,” she said.
Now a lawmaker in parliament and the head of an opposition political party, Tymoshenko is a fiery and sometimes divisive figure in Ukrainian politics. She served as prime minister twice, under President Viktor Yushchenko, before challenging Viktor Yanukovych for the presidency in 2010.
She was jailed during the Yanukovych presidency for nearly 2 1/2 years until the February 2014 Maidan revolution, which culminated in violent street clashes and in Yanukovych fleeing Ukraine for Russia.
She finished a distant second to Petro Poroshenko in the 2014 presidential election, and finished third in the 2019 presidential election, trailing both Poroshenko and Volodymyr Zelenskiy, who won the vote.
In the 2019 parliamentary vote, her political bloc -- called Fatherland – announced that its position would be in opposition to Zelenskiy’s Servant of the People bloc, which held a majority in the Ukrainian parliament.
Among other things, the party opposed legislation backed by Zelenskiy to allow the sale of farmland -- a controversial move in Ukraine, where agriculture plays a traditional and important role in the country’s economy.
Tymoshenko was also a key player in Ukraine’s oil and gas industry, and negotiated directly with Putin and top Russian industry officials in the 2000s amid a series of crises over Russian gas supplies to Ukraine.
“We must understand that this mistaken idea of Putin's mission in the world could disfigure the lives of not only those in Ukraine, Georgia, and Moldova, but it could affect every European country where he sees his interest in one way or another,” she said. “You can read this, among other things, in the ultimatum that he delivered to the Western world, the United States, and NATO.”
“This is madness, this is some incredibly perverted perception of reality. Does this mean that the countries of Central and Eastern Europe, the Baltic countries should be thrown out of the Western world, from the NATO system, collective security?”
Then-Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin (left) signs a gas supply deal with his Ukrainian counterpart, Yulia Tymoshenko, in Yalta in November 2009.
She said the Russian invasion had only bolstered her support for Ukraine joining NATO eventually. The Kremlin vehemently opposes Ukrainian membership, and has demanded that the Zelenskiy government foreswear it for the future.
“No one can tell us from the outside, especially the aggressor country, how we should build our lives, how we should form our constitution, how we should build the government of our country and the management of our army,” she told Current Time, a Russian-language network led by RFE/RL in cooperation with VOA.
“No one has the right today to set conditions for Ukraine, that we ought to surrender part of our territory in exchange for the withdrawal from our country of someone carrying around dirty weapons.”
“Ukraine's membership in NATO is the most powerful guarantee, second only to having a strong army, which can once and for all stop any attempts by the Russian Federation to seize Ukraine,” she said.
“And such attempts will not stop. We should not be in any way naive, thinking that today's events, that peace talks will stop the aggressor's plans to seize Ukraine.”