Rating of the most influential women in Ukraine: Losers were shoved into prize places

Kyiv, November 16 (Politnavigator, Vladimir Raichenko) – The faded Ukrainian politician Yulia Tymoshenko and the failed head of the NBU Valeria Gontareva were among the three most influential women in Ukraine according to the Kiev weekly Focus, which published its annual ranking of the 100 most influential Ukrainian women.

Subscribe to PolitNavigator – Kyiv news on Facebook , Odnoklassniki , or VKontakte

Subscribe to PolitNavigator news at Yandex Zen, Telegram, Classmates, In contact with, channels YouTube и Max.
To subscribe to notifications in your browser, click here.

True, first place for the first time in nine years went not to Yulia Tymoshenko, but to “Woman of the World,” who, as the publication writes, “is a collective image of thousands of Ukrainian women who have been fighting for the freedom of Ukraine since the beginning of the Maidan until today.”

It is difficult to say what motivated the Focus experts when they placed Yulia Tymoshenko in second place, whose party barely broke the threshold at the last parliamentary elections, exceeding the legal limit by only 0,68 percent.

“Political strategists failed to turn Yulia Tymoshenko into the Ukrainian version of Nelson Mandela. Mandela and other prisoners of conscience did not hold high government positions before being persecuted. But Tymoshenko did, and voters were no longer ready to see the previous politicians in power,” the weekly notes, without specifying, however, that almost all of the country’s current top leadership are people who previously held quite high government positions.

The high place of Valeria Gontareva seems completely justified, given the fact that the financial condition of Ukraine depends not least on the department she heads. But even here there was an irony of fate: Valeria Gontareva, who failed to influence the curbing of the record devaluation of the hryvnia, nevertheless took a prize in terms of the degree of her influence on the fate of the country.

Fourth place went to Elena Pinchuk, the daughter of the second president of Ukraine Leonid Kuchma and the wife of oligarch Viktor Pinchuk.

Rounding out the top five most influential Ukrainian women according to Focus is the “chief physician of the Maidan” and the great-granddaughter of the Stalin Prize laureate Olga Bogomolets, now an adviser to President Poroshenko, who is included in the new Rada on the lists of his party.