Has anybody been following the Timoshenko case in Ukraine?

[RZM]

Yulia Timoshenko was one of the faces of the Orange coalition, which was swept out of power last year. She's now on trial for corruption and she claims her prosecution is politically motivated.

I'm not going to get into the ins and outs of the case. Rather, I'm going to point out how two of the players in the trial look like well-known fantasy-fiction characters :)

First there's Yulia herself. I've always thought she was vaguely reminiscent of Princess Leia because of the nifty way she does her hair.




But even more striking is the judge in the case, the 31-year old Rodion Kireev. He's been dubbed 'Harry Potter' in the media and you can see here why.

[FreakinDJ]

1. Shiney Button

[bananas]

2. Wow - thanks for that! nt

[bananas]

3. Here's a picture of her wearing a Star Trek uniform

http://pik.tv/en/news/story/Yulia-Timoshenko-Detained-by-Ukraines-Prosecutor-General

[bananas]

4. Here she's frozen in a block of carbonite, just like Hans Solo was

http://newage.livejournal.com/171958.html

[RZM]

5. LOL. I like these :)

The artist looks like Harvey Keitel if he had some way distant Tatar ancestry.

[bananas]

6. It was fun, thanks for starting the thread! nt

[indurancevile]

7. She started in the gas industry apparently.

In 1989-1991, Yulia and Oleksandr Tymoshenko founded and headed a Komsomol video rental company "Terminal" in Dnipropetrovsk<24><27> (which grew to be quite successful), and later privatized it.

In 1991 Tymoshenko established (jointly with her husband Oleksandr, Gennadi Tymoshenko and Olexandr Gravets)<27> "The Ukrainian Petrol Corporation", a company that provided the agriculture industry of Dnipropetrovsk with fuel from 1991 to 1995.<26> Tymoshenko worked as a General Director. From 1995 to 1997,<6> Tymoshenko was the president of the United Energy Systems of Ukraine, a privately owned middleman company that became the main importer of Russian natural gas to Ukraine in 1996. During that time she was nicknamed "gas princess" in light of accusations that she had been reselling enormous quantities of stolen gas and avoiding taxation of those deals. She was also accused of "having given Pavlo Lazarenko kickbacks in exchange for her company's stranglehold on the country's gas supplies".<28> During this period Tymoshenko was involved in business relations (either co-operative or hostile) with many important figures of Ukraine. The list includes Pavlo Lazarenko, Viktor Pinchuk, Ihor Kolomoyskyi, Rinat Akhmetov, and Leonid Kuchma who at that time was the President of Ukraine. All of these except for Akhmetov are, like Tymoshenko, originally from Dnipropetrovsk. Tymoshenko has also been closely linked to the management of the Russian corporation, Gazprom.<29>

Tymoshenko is said to have acquired a significant fortune between 1990 and 1998. It was during this period of privatization (which historians have described as a period full of corruption and mismanagement) that she became one of the wealthiest oligarchs in Ukraine.<28>

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yulia_Tymoshenko

[Cereal Kyller]

8. This is the kind of hard-hitting news that our media shys away from!

Sadly, it's too late to rec. :eyes: