text: Kuchma's 1994 presidential campaign had been financed by Dnipropetrovsk businessmen Ihor Kolomoyskyi and Gennadiy Bogolyubov. Kolomoyskyi and Bogolyubov were partners in Privat Group, a scandal-ridden financial-industrial conglomerate. As prime Minister, Kuchma had granted their PrivatBank the unique privilege of opening overseas branches. These were later implicated in the wholesale defrauding of Ukrainian depositors, leading to the bank's nationalization in 2016. Kuchma was also closely tied to another budding Dnipropetrovsk billionaire, his son-in-law Viktor Pinchuk whose assets included several giant steel and pipe plants in the region and the bank Kredit-Dnepr.
  With Viktor Yushchenko, Tymoshenko co-led the Orange Revolution which annulled the declared victory of Viktor Yanukovych in the 2004 presidential election, and under President Yuschenko served as prime minister from 24 January to 8 September 2005, and again from 18 December 2007 to 4 March 2010. Yanukovych narrowly defeated Tymoshenko in the 2010 presidential election, taking 41.7 per cent of the vote in the Dnipropetrovsk region. The candidates accused one another of vote rigging.
  In the October 2012 Ukrainian parliamentary election Yanukovych's Party of Regions, which promoted itself as the champion of the language rights and industrial interests of largely Russian-speaking eastern Ukraine, won 35.8 per cent of the vote in the Dnipropetrovsk region, compared to 18.4 per cent for Tymoshenko's Fatherland Party and 19.4 per cent for the Communists. Tymoshenko mounted a hunger strike to once again protest election irregularities.