Biography | Yulia Tymoshenko — The Rada Vote That Made Her Ukraine’s First Woman Prime Minister

On February 4, 2005, Ukraine’s parliament confirmed Yulia Tymoshenko as prime minister inside the Verkhovna Rada building in Kyiv.

The vote came less than two weeks after President Viktor Yushchenko had named her acting prime minister at the beginning of his presidency.

Tymoshenko entered the chamber as one of the most recognizable leaders of the Orange Revolution, the mass protest movement that had forced a rerun of the disputed 2004 presidential election.

Before deputies voted, Yushchenko formally presented his nominee and asked parliament to approve the government that would carry the movement’s political victory into office.

The result was unusually broad: 373 of the 450 deputies supported Tymoshenko, far more than the 226 votes required.

No deputy voted against the nomination, while three abstained, according to contemporary reporting.

The approval made Tymoshenko the first woman to lead Ukraine’s government and placed a former energy executive at the head of the country’s cabinet.

Her proposed program emphasized fighting corruption, improving living standards, and opening a path toward negotiations on European Union membership.

Those goals reflected the hopes attached to the Orange coalition, but they also exposed the scale of the task before a government assembled from competing political allies.

Tymoshenko’s first term would last only until September 2005, when disputes inside the coalition led Yushchenko to dismiss the cabinet.

She later returned as prime minister in December 2007, making the 2005 vote the first of two parliamentary confirmations that defined the central phase of her national career.

The attached photograph was taken in the parliamentary chamber on the day of the vote and shows Tymoshenko addressing deputies from the rostrum.

The pin marks the Verkhovna Rada building, the documented public venue for the confirmation, without identifying a room-level access point, entrance, or security route.

At this chamber, a movement leader became a head of government through an overwhelming recorded vote.

Photo: Sashazlv, public domain; photographed in the Ukrainian parliament on February 4, 2005.