If you forget the name, you’ll remember the braids; the blonde corona framing her head that declares: ‘Ukraine, c’est moi.’ After Angela Merkel, Yulia Tymoshenko is perhaps (Mrs Thatcher excepted) the European woman politician best known outside her own country. Merkel is low-key and plain-speaking, an austere, common-sense pragmatist; Tymoshenko, the imprisoned former prime minister of Ukraine, is emotional, self-dramatising, glamorous, Eva Perón in peasant braids. Her supporters have taken to holding up a picture of her head growing out of a field of wheat, a version of the blue (for sky) and yellow (for fields of grain) Ukrainian flag in which Tymoshenko’s face becomes the sun. No one suggests any formal co-ordination, but the odd couple of Merkel and Tymoshenko have ended up drawing attention to something many European politicians would rather ignore: that Ukraine, co-host of the Euro 2012 football championships starting on 8 June, is a swamp of corruption and sub-Putinesque authoritarianism.

LRB 7 June 2012 | PDF Download