Yulia Tymoshenko

Yulia Volodymyrivna Tymoshenko (born November 27, 1960) is a Ukrainian politician.
Tymoshenko was the Prime Minister of Ukraine from January 24 to September 8, 2005, and again from December 18, 2007 to March 4, 2010 when she was dismissed from the post by the Verkhovna Rada, Ukraine's parliament. She is the leader of the All-Ukrainian Union "Fatherland" party and the Yulia Tymoshenko Bloc.

She has been a practising economist and academic. Prior to her political career, Yulia Tymoshenko was a successful but controversial businesswoman in the gas industry, becoming by some estimates one of the richest people in the country. Before becoming Ukraine's first female Prime Minister in 2005, Tymoshenko co-led the Orange Revolution.

Tymoshenko was a candidate in the Ukrainian presidential elections of 2010. During the first round of voting, Tymoshenko gained approximately 25% of the votes, which put her in second place, behind Viktor Yanukovych. On March 3, 2010 the Ukrainian Parliament passed a motion of no confidence in the second Tymoshenko Government that led to the fall of the cabinet.

Tymoshenko was born in Dnipropetrovsk, Ukraine (then part of the Soviet Union) to Ludmila Nikolaevna Telegina, a Russian-speaking Ukrainian, and Vladimir Abramovich Hryhyan, (there has been speculation her father is of Armenian descent). Her father left the family when Yulia was three years old. Tymoshenko took the surname of her mother, under which she graduated. Tymoshenko has reported that she did not learn to speak Ukrainian until she was 36. In 1979, Tymoshenko married Oleksandr Tymoshenko, son of a mid-level Soviet communist party bureaucrat. In 1980 their daughter Eugenia was born.

Tymoshenko graduated from the Dnipropetrovsk State University with a degree in economics in 1984, and went on to gain a Ph.D. in economics. Since then, she has written about 50 papers. Tymoshenko is also a former student of the National Mining University of Ukraine, but did not graduate there.

From 1995 to 1997, 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".

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.