Is Yulia Tymoshenko really this crazy?  If you are interviewing Dmitry Vydrin, who’s got quite the axe to grind, the answer is yes.  Apart from those who think she is the hottest head of state, Tymoshenko has been getting some very bad press in the West lately, some of it deserved, but some of it not.  For example in Ioffe’s piece there’s the bit about “authoritarian proclivities.”  True, she banned once banned political rallies while citing swine flu, but Ukraine has never really experienced a governing coalition strong enough for anybody to do very much Putin-izing of the country.  The real question is not if, but when, Ukraine was lost to Russia.

“She was told she is the reincarnation of Eva Perón,” says Dmitry Vydrin, who was Tymoshenko’s close adviser for nearly a decade. “And she believes it. She admits it in closed circles. She copies her consciously and subconsciously.” There’s the elaborate, kaleidoscopic wardrobe; the bleached up-do; the theatrical mannerisms; the way the public rustles whenever she appears. “It’s that way of flirting with the public, of addressing them as ‘my loved ones,'” Vydrin says. And there are the men whom the two women used to get out of poverty, but then brightly eclipsed. For Evita, it was her husband, Argentine President Juan Perón; for Tymoshenko, it was a string of well-connected men, starting with her father-in-law and ending with Ukraine’s current president and hero of the 2004 Orange Revolution, Viktor Yushchenko. (…)