I think everyone remembers how certain Russian bureaucrats used to work against the Ukrainian opposition; I think it is hard to drop old habits.

I know the Russian political elite has got used to the Ukraine suffering from an inferiority complex, but I want this to disappear from our relationship.

I will get to the truth, if not in Ukrainian courts, then in international ones. I will fight to my last breath. They want to put me in prison but that won't help. My voice will be heard even louder from prison than now, and the whole world will hear me.

We will fight and defend my good name in the European court. We have to be strong and defend Ukraine from this authoritarianism.

The old bastions of the post-communist regime collapsed before my very eyes. The monsters who had kept Ukraine in a criminal state left the stage.

Ukraine is a vital link for Europe: our energy transportation networks; our location between the European Union and Eurasia. We're the melting pot of Catholicism and Orthodox Christianity. The democracy we founded with the Orange Revolution has to be an example for other post-Soviet states.

I never complain. I chose the road of fighting with the Ukrainian oligarchy in 1996, and have paid for this with my freedom and that of my husband, my father and my close friends.