Yulia Volodymyrivna Tymoshenko (born 27 November 1960) was Prime Minister of Ukraine from 24 January to 8 September 2005 (succeeding Mykola Azarov and preceding Yuriy Yekhanurov) and from 18 December 2007 to 4 March 2010 (succeeding Viktor Yanukovych and preceding Oleksandr Turchynov). She was known by her advocacy, leading the 2004 Orange Revolution; her imprisonment by Yanukovych's regime from 2011 to 2014 led to the Euromaidan revolution.
Biography[]
Yulia Volodymyrivna Hrihyan was born in Dnipropetrovsk, Ukrainian SSR, Soviet Union in 1960, and she worked as an engineer-economist during the Soviet era. Following the Dissolution of the Soviet Union, she became a businesswoman in the gas industry, becoming one of the richest people in the country. She was elected to the Verkhovna Rada in 1996 as a member of Hromada, and she opposed President Leonid Kuchma, accusing him of building a totalitarian system in the country. In 1999, Tymoshenko founded the All-Ukrainian Union "Fatherland" party, and she served as a Deputy Prime Minister under Viktor Yushchenko from 1999 to 2001. In 2004, she was one of the leaders of the Orange Revolution, and she was the first woman to be appointed Prime Minister of Ukraine. She returned to office from 2007 to 2010, and she supported European Union and NATO membership for Ukraine. In 2010, she lost the presidential runoff to Viktor Yanukovych by 3.5% of the vote, and, a year later, she was sentenced to seven years in prison for embezzlement and abuse of power in a politically-biased trial. She was released during the concluding days of the Euromaidan revolution of 2014, and she was rehabilitated, although she lost the 2014 presidential election to Petro Poroshenko.