This NYT Magazine piece profiles Yulia Tymoshenko, once the Queen of Ukraine's Orange Revolution, now a bitter enemy of President Viktor Yushchenko.

An excerpt:

One Thursday morning this past September,Yulia Tymoshenko, Ukraine's prime minister, came to work to discover she had been fired. It is rare that events conspire to nudge Tymoshenko off balance. In a photograph taken that morning, the heroine of Ukraine's Orange Revolution and, as prime minister, her country's second most powerful official, looks stricken, gaping at a television screen on which her former ally, President Viktor Yushchenko, announces his decision to dissolve a bickering and ineffective government. By the next day, Tymoshenko would be swinging a hatchet in the sort of political brawl at which she excels. But for the moment, the peasant-braided field marshal of mass protests in this ex-Soviet republic resembled that archetypal creature: a handsome woman wronged.

Tymoshenko spoke not long after her firing of the "shock" of her dismissal, and she was not the only person in the world surprised by it. In the last weeks of 2004, she emerged in the Western media as the belligerently populist leader whose good looks, energy and anti-establishment rhetoric made her an icon of the demonstrations that incapacitated Kiev and resulted in the overturning of a fraudulent presidential election. In the aftermath, Tymoshenko's partner, the opposition candidate Yushchenko, assumed Ukraine's presidency. He promised to orient the country Westward, away from its traditional hegemon Russia, and to tackle its biggest problem: the near-total corruption of its official and economic life. Faced with Tymoshenko's cultlike following among the protesters, the newly inaugurated president, who was suspicious of her headstrong political style, was forced to concede her the prime ministership she demanded, choosing her over candidates closer to him. On a wave of optimism, Ukraine's "orange" government, so named for Yushchenko's eye-catching campaign color, got to work in February. Ruled for so long by jowly ex-Communists, Ukraine now had leaders with whom the West could do business. Everything seemed fine.

By late summer, however, the Yushchenko-Tymoshenko alliance had become a disaster, with the two leaders' camps at war and with Tymoshenko's followers accusing the Yushchenko administration of corruption. Few of the Orange Revolution's reformist goals had been met. It had also become clear that the two pillars of the revolution had visions for Ukraine that were as different as their personalities. Yushchenko is a soft-spoken and conciliatory former banker, and his presidency has been characterized by an almost painfully deliberate approach to ending official Ukraine's robust criminal culture. In contrast, Tymoshenko is a passionate radical by nature, who made settling accounts with Ukraine's crooked "oligarch" class a central theme of her tenure in office. Tymoshenko, who is 45 but looks and acts younger, is also a brash custodian of her own celebrity. The difference between how the politicians use the spotlight, or don't, was highlighted in late November at a snowy mass rally in Kiev to commemorate the revolution's first anniversary. Yushchenko trudged onto the stage in a stolid overcoat to recite an overlong speech; Tymoshenko, a rather small woman, crashed onto the scene late, electrifying her constituency as she was carried down through the crowd on her handlers' shoulders, laughing and waving Ukraine's flag. Camera lights intensified the luxurious whiteness of her clothes; followers screaming "Yulka!" (the diminutive form of her first name) jostled to get near her.

Tymoshenko's emotional, to-the-barricades rhetoric, in which she calls down thunder on Ukraine's robber elites, was honed in recent years, when she threw herself recklessly against President Leonid Kuchma's regime. She spent time in prison under Kuchma and had a flair for confrontation as a parliamentarian: she once tried to stab a rival legislator with a stiletto heel and threatened to use her hunting rifle on law-enforcement "rabbits" who made noises about arresting her. She is fun to watch, and you're not surprised when offbeat things happen to her: when her 25-year-old daughter recently married the singer in a British rock band called the Death Valley Screamers, it seemed appropriate. In 2005, Tymoshenko achieved a new level of renown, being named the world's third-most-powerful woman by Forbes and staring from the cover of Ukraine's edition of Elle. She is even something of a sex symbol: a series of Russian porn videos star a Tymoshenko look-alike.