Yulia Tymoshenko: Ukraine's bruised firebrand

Poor Viktor Yanukovych. In what looked very much like vengeance, Ukraine's president last year succeeded in jailing his main political opponent. Finally, it appeared, Yanukovych had got the better of his nemesis, Yulia Tymoshenko, sending her to prison for seven years and locking her up in a female penal colony in the eastern city of Kharkiv.

This weekend, however, Yanukovych's strategy looks like a woeful blunder. True, Tymoshenko is still in prison. But Yanukovych has become the international community's newest hate figure. Last week, Angela Merkel announced she and the entire German cabinet will boycott the 2012 European football championships, which Ukraine is co-hosting with Poland, unless Tymoshenko is freed. Merkel said she wouldn't attend Germany's match against the Netherlands next month. The venue is Kharkiv, just down the road from Tymoshenko's cell.

Other EU bosses followed Merkel. The European commissioner, José Manuel Barroso, said he was boycotting Ukraine; the EU president, Herman Van Rompuy, said he wouldn't travel either. The US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, expressed concern. Downing Street is sitting on the fence, but has signalled that British ministers may stay away from England's three group games to be played in the capital Kiev – where the Euro 2012 final will be played on 1 July – and in Donetsk.

Tymoshenko has been on hunger strike since 20 April. She alleges that when prison guards forcibly removed her to hospital they beat her up. Photos showing bruises to her arms and stomach have fuelled international outrage. Her daughter, Eugenia, told the Guardian on Wednesday that her mother had been "brutally" punched; Ukrainian authorities say her injuries are self-inflicted.

Even Vladimir Putin has been appalled by her mistreatment. There are sound reasons for this: keeping Ukraine politically weak and divided suits Russia's strategic interests. But Putin – inaugurated tomorrow for a third stint as Russia's president – appears to have a soft spot for Ukraine's opposition leader. He has gallantly offered Tymoshenko medical treatment in Russia. German doctors say she is suffering from a herniated spinal disc; Berlin also wants to give refuge to the woman known as Lady Yu.

In a matter of days, Tymoshenko – firebrand co-leader of Ukraine's 2004 Orange Revolution – has succeeded in recapturing the world's attention. She may be confined to a cell, but she has again shown herself to be one of Europe's most beguiling and resourceful politicians. "It really takes a novelist or playwright to do her justice. She has glamour, hubris and potential tragedy," observed Andrew Wilson, senior fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations.

More than this, Tymoshenko has adroitly focused the west's attention on the dark things that have been happening in Ukraine since she narrowly lost to Yanukovych in the country's 2010 presidential election. During her election campaign, she warned that Yanukovych would rip up Ukraine's nascent democracy; her aides talked condescendingly of Yanukovych's "Soviet mental map". Not enough voters believed her. She was proved right more quickly than anybody expected.

Once in office, Yanukovych broke parliamentary rules, squeezed the independent media and began selectively prosecuting his political enemies. Five members of Tymoshenko's former government are now in jail. She was convicted of "illegally" agreeing a 2009 gas deal with Russia.

Tymoshenko was born in 1960 in Dnipropetrovsk, a city in eastern Soviet Ukraine. Like Yanykovych, she grew up without a father. After leaving school, she married Oleksandr Tymoshenko, the son of the local Communist party boss. The couple still appear to be together.

But he was the first of a series of usefully connected men who have sponsored her career, first in business and then in politics, and given her a "krysha", the "roof" necessary to succeed in post-Soviet life. "She is clearly a clever operator who is not above using her considerable feminine charms to do things," Wilson said.

After studying engineering at university, Tymoshenko went into business. By the mid-1990s, she had become president of United Energy Systems of Ukraine. The company became the main importer of Russian natural gas.

This monopoly made her rich, with the firm used as a battering ram to take over other industries. Yanukovych's prosecutors accuse her of various crimes from this period and are preparing fresh charges. Did she act unlawfully? She denies it. The spirit of the 1990s was predatory oligarchic capitalism; Tymoshenko appears to have behaved little differently from others, in an era when there were few rules.

Her political rise was rapid. By 1999, she had become deputy prime minister responsible for fuel and energy. Two years later, however, Ukraine's then president, Leonid Kuchma, fired her. It was then that she discovered her talent as a fearless political campaigner. Together with Viktor Yushchenko, she opposed Kuchma's choice as his successor in the country's 2004 elections, the Kremlin-friendly Yanukovych. When Yanukovych attempted to steal the vote, protests broke out across Ukraine and an Orange tent city appeared in Kiev. This was the Orange Revolution. She became its unstoppable face.

Tymoshenko was unlike any other post-Soviet female politician. Eschewing the conventional bling and cleavage favoured by other high-profile women, she wore her hair in a braided crown. Her clothes, chosen from Kiev boutiques, radiated peasant chic. Her image was sexy yet demure – a knock-out combination in a world dominated by pasty-looking men in dull suits. (One journalist who met her in 2004 complained that she "softly but persistently" stroked his arm throughout the interview; he failed to take notes.)

Yushchenko won the rerun presidential election and appointed Tymoshenko his prime minister. Soon, however, it emerged that the two Orange leaders couldn't get on. There were rumours that Yulia and Mrs Yushchenko disliked each other; complaints from the Yulia camp that Yushchenko was prolix and had a messiah complex; and accusations of sexism. In 2005, Yushchenko fired Tymoshenko and brought in Yanukovych.

Tymoshenko bounced back as prime minister in 2007, a job she held until 2010. But she proved less successful in government than she did as a campaigner; micro-managing, and barking orders in cabinet, for sure, but failing to get to grips with Ukraine's deepening recession. "She wasn't good at delegating or forming a team," Wilson observed. By 2010 the Orange Revolution had fizzled out, with ordinary Ukrainians fed up with the warring antics of the Orange duo and harsh economic times.

International observers say Yanukovych's 2010 election victory was fair. But in power, he, too, has found governing tough; recently his poll ratings have slumped.

Many Ukrainians are now dissatisfied with the country's entire political class, seeing it as venal and self-serving. Whether they are pro-western or pro-eastern, the elite are seen as little more than crooks. And yet Yanukovych's clumsy hounding of Tymoshenko has, in part, rehabilitated her in the eyes of the public. Her opinion poll ratings have crept up.

It may be coincidence that Tymoshenko has started her hunger strike at a moment when Ukraine is preparing to host the biggest sporting event in its post-communist history. Or canny timing. Either way, Tymoshenko now seems ascendant again.

"We have a paradoxical situation," Sergiy Taran, director of Kiev's International Democracy Institute, said. "We have two leaders. One is in prison, the other is in power. Yanukovych has media, money, everything. And yet it is Tymoshenko who has the higher level of support. She's more influential than ever." Taran added that political leaders doing time was one of the hallmarks of a "transitional society". (Yanukovych also sat in prison as a teenager, after being convicted of theft and hooliganism.) Ukraine was emulating the experience of other European countries but a few decades late, he said.

Despite EU pressure, Yanukovych is unlikely to free Tymoshenko. His government has reacted sharply to what it sees as German bullying, with officials decrying "Cold War tactics". The president's aim, it appears, is to keep her there during parliamentary elections in October.

But if his current unpopularity continues, he will struggle to win re-election in 2015 – at which point Tymoshenko will emerge from her cell. She is barred from taking part in this autumn's poll but is acknowledged by Ukraine's opposition as its pre-eminent leader.

According to Taran, her ultimate ambition is to be president. It is the drive for power that, more than anything, keeps her going. "Yanukovych is a very different person. He wants material prosperity. Yulia isn't interested in material things," he suggested.

But what could one expect from President Tymoshenko? "We don't really know," Taran admitted. "She could be a great reformer. Or she could be a dictator."