And then they woke up

摘要

Like many separating lovers, they were at first civil-but they soon gave up. President Viktor Yushchenko now accuses Yu-lia Timoshenko, the other leading light of the orange revolution and Ukraine's prime minister until he sacked her last week, of abusing her position and misusing government funds. A sign of his weakness, says Mrs Timoshenko, piously: "I am ashamed for him." Ukraine's government imploded after the president's chief of staff resigned, accusing (among others) Petro Poroshenko, the head of the national security council, of corruption. The charges involve familiar sorts of graft: pressuring judges, auctioning access to the president and so on. Mr Poroshenko, a wealthy businessman-and, according to Mrs Timoshenko, the man who ruined her relationship with the president-insisted that his office had not enriched him by a single kopeck, but he still quit. Mr Yushchenko says he tried to broker a trade-off of other resignations between warring factions; in the end, he fired them all. Mrs Timoshenko says she was punished for obstructing the looting of the country, and to distract attention from a corruption scandal. This is "a very stupid theory", says Mr Poroshenko.