Jailed former Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko has called for the scrapping of an agreement that allows Russia to retain its naval base at Sevastopol until 2042, Tymoshenko's Batkivshchyna party website reported on Friday.
The Russian Black Sea Fleet is stationed at the historic port of Sevastopol in Crimea under a lease agreement with Ukraine. Moscow and Kiev signed the so-called Kharkiv agreements on April 21, 2010, extending the fleet's lease to the base for another 25 years after the current lease expires in 2017.
The Kharkiv agreements, which were ratified by parliament in April 2010, violate Ukrainian and international law, Tymoshenko said.
“The Ukrainian Constitution was violated. It clearly states: foreign military bases on Ukrainian territory shall not be permitted,” Batkivshchyna quoted Tymoshenko as saying.
Tymoshenko, who is serving a seven-year prison term for abuse of office, has severe back pain and cannot walk. Doctors from German clinic Charite who examined Tymoshenko diagnosed her with “an acute form of herniation of intervertebral disks” Dr. Karl Max Einhaeupl of Berlin's Charite clinic said.
The Ukrainian Foreign Ministry said it is ready to provide maximum assistance to the German doctors in the diagnosis and treatment of Tymoshenko.
The media earlier reported that the German president has refused to come to a Central European summit scheduled for May 11-12 in Yalta due to the political situation in Ukraine.
In particular, the newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung, citing unnamed sources, reported that President Joachim Gauck said he was would skip the summit to register his protest of Tymoshenko's treatment in a Kharkov penal colony.
“The situation with the President of Germany is absolutely artificially spun," Ukrainian Foreign Ministry spokesman Oleh Voloshin said at a briefing on Friday. "We have known for a long time, a few months already, that the German president would not come.
