Tymoshenko to run for Ukraine presidency

Ukrainian former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, released from jail last month after President Viktor Yanukovich was forced by protesters to step down, has announced she will again run for president in an election slated for May 25.

“I plan to run for election as president” and stand as ”a candidate for Ukrainian unity,” Tymoshenko told reporters on Thursday.

Tymoshenko, 53, served twice as prime minister and ran for president in 2010, only to be narrowly beaten in a run-off vote by Yanukovich.

Yanukovich subsequently launched a campaign against Tymoshenko and her allies, and she was jailed in 2011 for abuse of office linked to a gas deal she brokered with Russia in 2009.

She served two years of a seven-year term, mainly under prison guard in a hospital in Kharkiv, before being released when Yanukovich fled on February 20 and was subsequently ousted by parliament.

The announcement came as the International Monetary Fund pledged up to $18bn in loans on Thursday to prop up Ukraine’s sinking economy.

Arseniy Yatsenyuk, Ukraine’s interim prime minister, has forecast more pain ahead without reforms that will affect nearly everyone in the country.

In a lengthy and passionate address to parliament, Yatsenyuk warned that Ukraine was “on the brink of the economic and financial bankruptcy” and laid out details for fixes needed to put the country back on track, including raising taxes, a freeze on minimum wage and radically higher energy prices.

The reforms will hit households hard, which is likely to severely dent the interim government’s tenuous hold on power.