THEY used to call her the “gas princess”. But the swarms of protesters on Independence Square in Kiev now refer to Yuliya Tymoshenko as Ukraine’s Joan of Arc.

The fiery blonde opposition deputy is at the heart of the so-called chestnut revolution that threatened to tear the country apart yesterday when eastern regions said that they would hold a referendum on autonomy next month.

With her rousing speeches, slim figure and glamorous looks she has inflamed and sustained huge demonstrations in support of Viktor Yushchenko, the opposition leader, who accuses the Government of rigging the presidential election eight days ago.

While Mr Yushchenko has called for a new vote on December 12 and met his rival, Viktor Yanukovych, the Prime Minister, to try to resolve the crisis, Mrs Tymoshenko, who was 44 on Saturday, has repeatedly called for the people to seize power by blockading state buildings and taking over airports, railways and roads.

She has urged tens of thousands of supporters to surround the Supreme Court today when it hears an opposition claim that the election was unfair.

“We will go to the Supreme Court not to pressure it but to support honest judges,” she said. And if the Supreme Court does not back the opposition, Mrs Tymoshenko will be the one orchestrating the reaction of the crowds.

“We are going to go to the presidential administration in a peaceful way, without breaking anything. And either they will give up their power or we will take it,” she declared after official results put the Prime Minister in the lead.

With her pigtailed hair tied in a bun in Ukrainian peasant style, Mrs Tymoshenko then led demonstrators in driving snow to the presidential headquarters. When the crowd reached a line of several hundred riot police in front of the building she picked up a loudhailer and urged them to join the demonstration. “I am asking you, the police, to be on the side of citizens of Ukraine,” she yelled before crossing the police line to hold talks with senior officers.

When she emerged, she warned the crowds not to push on as she had seen Russian special forces, armed and ready to shoot, inside. The claim was impossible to verify and was dismissed out of hand by the Russian Government and most analysts. “She is Yushchenko’s pit bull — she says things he can’t and keeps the pressure on the Government while making him look like the reasonable statesman who you can negotiate with ,” said Markian Bilynskyj, vice-president of the US Ukraine Foundation and an expert on Ukrainian politics.

Most of Ukraine’s ruling elite are Soviet-trained bureaucrats. Like many of them, including the Prime Minister, Mrs Tymoshenko hails from the industrialised and Russian-speaking east of the country.

She was barely out of university in the 1980s when she took advantage of the new spirit of openness by going into business with her father-in-law renting films to rural cinemas.

Her talents as an economist and businesswoman soon earned her a place among the new post-Soviet elite and between 1995 and 1997 she headed Unified Energy Systems, an energy concern which also employed her husband and father-in-law.

In March 1998 she was elected to parliament and served as deputy prime minister in Mr Yushchenko’s reformist Government from December 1999 to January 2001.

But when she took on the task of cleaning up the country’s notoriously corrupt energy sector, her relationship with President Kuchma soured. He accused her of exceeding her power and dismissed her from the Government in 2001. He also dismissed Mr Yushchenko in April of that year. Not long afterwards, prosecutors began to investigate Mrs Tymoshenko for allegedly smuggling fuel.

She was even detained and thrown in jail for a month, sparking demonstrations by her supporters. Prosecutors accused her, her husband, her father-in-law and an accountant of illegally acquiring $2.25 billion through corrupt natural gas deals and financial schemes. She and her husband, Oleksander, were acquitted, but prosecutors are charging her father-in-law, Henadiy.

The episode left her bitter. Mrs Tymoshenko set up her own party and became one of President Kuchma’s strongest critics. This year she joined Mr Yushchenko’s Our Ukraine bloc to form the People’s Power coalition, which she co-chairs.

If Mr Yushchenko does take over as President, Mrs Tymoshenko would be a popular choice to become Prime Minister.

“I admire her so much and I think she will be a great Prime Minister,” Viktoria Bondarenko, 29, said as she joined the Independence Square crowds.

But the Government is expected to oppose her appointment as it would infuriate President Putin and President Kuchma.

A month before the first round of the presidential election, Russian military prosecutors began to investigate Mrs Tymoshenko, alleging that she had bribed a Russian defence official while heading Unified Energy Systems. She refused to respond to a summons.

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