Tymoshenko health alarm grows after leaked report

Supporters of Ukraine's jailed former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko on Monday expressed grave concern for her health after a leaked medical report said she required urgent hospitalisation. Ukrainian online newspaper Ukrainska Pravda on Friday published scanned excerpts of the Ukrainian-language medical report drawn up by a German doctor who visited Tymoshenko with other international specialists in February. It said that she was suffering from such severe pain she could only sit up in bed for 10-15 minutes before having to lie down again and was unable to sleep on her side. The text, written by a doctor from the Berlin clinic Charite after the visit in February, said she needed "immediate" hospitalisation in a "specialised clinic" outside her prison. It said that Tymoshenko was suffering from an herniated spinal disc (slipped disc) which appears to be the origin of the severe back pain her lawyers say she has endured over the last months. "I am in shock. They are simply in the process of killing her," an MP from Tymoshenko's faction in parliament, Vyacheslav Peredery, told AFP. Her lawyer Sergiy Vlasenko said the authorities were looking at ways over "how to get rid of Tymoshenko" ahead of a looming ruling by the European Court of Human Rights on her case. "Unfortunately, the events in the Tymoshenko case are moving in a very tragic direction," he said, in comments published on her website. The German doctors who examined Tymoshenko in February made no detailed public declarations but Canadian practitioners who examined her at the same time had said that she was "ill and in constant pain". Ukraine's prisons service by contrast said in a statement that Tymoshenko had at the weekend again turned down offers of a prison medical check-up and had made no complaints about her condition. "She is moving around her room with the assistance of a walking frame and its gradually increasing her regime of movement," it said. Tymoshenko was jailed in 2011 for seven years on charges of abusing her powers while in office in agreeing contracts for gas imports for Russia. She is now serving her sentence at a prison in the Kharkiv region of east Ukraine. She has said her jailing is an act of political revenge by her rival President Viktor Yanukovych and her conviction has dealt a heavy blow to Ukraine's aspirations of joining the European Union.