Tymoshenko agrees to end hunger strike
2012-11-15 21:40
Kkarkiv - Jailed Ukrainian opposition leader Yulia Tymoshenko has agreed to end her hunger strike, her doctor said on Thursday, over two weeks after she stopped eating in protest against alleged fraud in parliamentary elections won by the country's ruling party.
"From tomorrow [Friday], she will stop her hunger strike," her German doctor Lutz Harms said, according to an Interfax news agency report.
"She is very weak," said Harms' colleague Annette Reischauer.
Ukraine's deputy health minister Raissa Moisseenko said earlier on Thursday that Tymoshenko had agreed to end her hunger strike which she began on 29 October after meeting the German doctors.
Harms urged Ukraine to improve hospital conditions for Tymoshenko, including ending a video surveillance of the opposition leader.
"An important condition for treatment is confidence between the doctor and his patient," he said.
Tymoshenko has been in hospital for a bad back she developed shortly after being sentenced in October to a seven-year jail term for abuse of power while prime minister.
She has called her controversial conviction a political vendetta on the part of her arch-foe President Viktor Yanukovych.
Tymoshenko began her hunger strike a day after the 28 October elections.
The United States and observers from the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), a global body that monitors voting around the world, have expressed concern that the elections were a step backwards for democracy in the ex-Soviet country.
