Former Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko has been taken from a Kiev prison to ‘a remote prison colony’. No further information is being offered.

Source: Liberty Confidential 

Tymoshenko was woken up during the night on Friday without explanation, carried to a police vehicle on a stretcher, and transported to a prison colony in the city of Kharkiv.

All news agencies are saying authorities are all “unavailable for immediate comment.”

News of the sudden, unscheduled, and unexplained late-night transfer comes from Tymoshenko’s aide, Oleksandr Turchynov; and he only learned of this from anonymous prison officials after it happened.

“The current authorities are violating the court verdict that ruled to keep Tymoshenko in jail, not in a colony,” Turchynov said.

The transfer comes a week after Tymoshenko lost an appeal against the verdict. Representatives of Ukraine’s intellectual circles, including social activists and writers, expressed outrage and signed a statement rejecting the court’s decision, the Interfax-Ukraine News Agency reported.

“The authorities took a sadistic decision to transfer Yulia Tymoshenko from Lukyanivka detention center to a penal colony, which is even more defiant taking into account the fact that it was done on New Year’s Eve,” prominent Ukrainian writer Lina Kostenko and other intellectuals said in the statement.

“It looks like they are cynically counting on the fact that people in their pre-holiday worries will forget about a person who knows how to be principled and consistent in saying ‘no’ to the mockery of the state and who has to pay for it today through being sent by Tsarist-Stalinist rule to a penal colony,” they added.

Tymoshenko, the nation’s top opposition leader, was sentenced to seven years in jail in October in a trial the West has condemned as politically motivated. Tymoshenko herself has claimed her trial is politically motivated and an attempt by President Viktor Yanukovych, who narrowly beat her in the presidential election in February 2010, to bar her from future elections.

She has been reportedly been in poor health, bedridden and denied medical care while locked up in a Kyiv prison cell.

Source: Liberty Confidential