Tymoshenko's daughter to meet German state ministers

The daughter of Ukraine's Yulia Tymoshenko will meet regional German justice ministers this week on the day the German national football team plays a Euro 2012 match in the city where the former premier is held prisoner, a German news magazine said Sunday. Yevgenia Tymoshenko, 32, has been invited to join regional justice ministers at their conference Wednesday and will discuss her jailed mother's situation, Spiegel news weekly said in an advance copy of its Monday edition. Germany faces the Netherlands in their second group match on the same evening in the eastern city of Kharkiv, one of four Ukrainian cities co-hosting Euro football with Poland, and where Tymoshenko was sent to a penal colony after her October 2011 conviction for abuse of power. Last month she was transferred for treatment for severe back pain to a Kharkiv hospital. "The pleasure in football and championing human rights are not opposite poles," the justice minister of the western state of Hesse, Joerg-Uwe Hahn, was quoted by Spiegel as saying. The Tymoshenko affair has deeply strained ties between Kiev and the West, which has called for her release. Tymoshenko, a driving force of Ukraine's 2004 pro-Western "Orange Revolution", served as prime minister in 2005 and again from 2007 to 2010, when she lost a presidential race to current leader Viktor Yanukovych. She was sentenced to seven years' prison in 2011 and barred from public office for another three. The same year she filed an application with the court, claiming her conviction was politically motivated.