Ukraine’s jailed ex-premier Yulia Tymoshenko has been on a hunger strike for the past five days to protest her treatment and demand an end to political repression, her lawyer said Tuesday. “Yulia Tymoshenko began a hunger strike on Friday,” her lawyer Serhiy Vlasenko told AFP after visiting Tymoshenko in the eastern city of Kharkiv where she has been jailed since last year on abuse-of-office charges. “It’s an unlimited hunger strike. She is calling for an end to political repressions in Ukraine,” her lawyer said. The flamboyant but divisive 2004 Orange Revolution leader was jailed for seven years for negotiating a gas deal with Russia while prime minister in 2009 that the new administration says was against Ukraine’s interests. Tymoshenko, 51, has complained of ill health in jail and asked to have treatment abroad. She began her hunger strike after she said she was forcibly taken to a local hospital on Friday evening. Her lawyer Vlasenko read out a statement in which Tymoshenko complained of being beaten by prison staff and dragged to an ambulance against her will. “Three strong men came up to my bed, threw a sheet on me and then started pulling me off the bed by force. In my pain and despair I defended myself as I could, and I received … a strong blow in the stomach,” Tymoshenko said in the statement. “They tied up my arms and legs and … dragged me out in the sheet,” she said. “I thought it was the last minutes of my life.” Her lawyer told journalists outside the prison earlier that “her arms were covered with bruises and she had a large bruise on her stomach, which is still visible four days after it happened.”
