KIEV, Jan. 27 – President Viktor Yanukovych, who leads Ukraine’s delegation to the World Economic Forum in Davos, is not expected to meet key world leaders and will mostly focus on multilateral events.

Yanukovych’s low-profile trip comes amid growing international criticism of the way his government and law enforcement agencies have been handling democracy issues and dealing with opposition groups.

“Today they don’t trust Ukraine,” Yulia Tymoshenko, the leader of Ukraine’s largest opposition party, said on Thursday. “Yanukovych’s trip to Davos is a waste of money because he doesn’t have an authority to attract investments to Ukraine.”

Leaders from more than 35 countries are attending this year’s economic forum in Davos, including French President Nicalas Sarkozy, German Chancellor Angela Merlel, U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron, Mexican President Felipe Calderon and others.

Serhiy Liovochkin, the chief of staff at the Yanukovych administration, denied the speculations that Yanukovych may had been boycotted by the world leaders.

He explained Yanukovych’s low profile at the Davos forum this year by the fact that the Ukrainian president had already met most of the international leaders last year.

“We met all world leaders last year,” Liovochkin told reporters in Davos.

At one of his rare bilateral meetings in Davos, Yanukovych on Thursday met United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon to discuss issues of nuclear and food security, his administration reported.

The developments come amid growing international criticism over an overwhelming number of criminal cases opened against opposition leaders in Ukraine.

The U.S. government specifically warned Ukraine last month that the latest investigations against opposition figures in Ukraine looked like "selective prosecution of political opponents."

Tymoshenko spoke on Thursday in front of the Prosecutor General’s Office where she had been questioned since the middle of December. She is charged with abuse of power during her time as the prime minister in 2009.

Tymoshenko denied the charges and said they were politically motivated as part of Yanukovych’s campaign to silence the opposition in Ukraine.

As prosecutors investigate Tymoshenko’s alleged abuse of office, they also restricted her ability to travel, effectively scrapping her plans for a number of international meetings.

The prosecutors on Jan 25 denied her request to travel to Brussels in early February for meetings with European leaders. The prosecutors argued that the request was submitted in a wrong way, because the invitation had to be submitted in Ukrainian language, not English.

Tymoshenko on Wednesday re-submitted the request, now including the invitation that had been translated in Ukrainian language.

Tymoshenko lost the presidential election to Viktor Yanukovych in February 2010, and quickly became the target of the criminal investigations.

The investigations intensified in December after Tymoshenko had visited Brussels and used her meetings with European leaders to publicly criticize Yanukovych for weakening and dismantling democracy in Ukraine.

After one such trip, an anonymous had allegedly caller phoned Tymoshenko and told her that she will “cough up blood” unless she stops criticizing Yanukovych internationally.

SBU, the security service controlled by Yanukovych, has failed to identify the caller.

“The president of Ukraine went to Davos against the background of unprecedented corruption that is taking place in Ukraine,” Tymoshenko said, adding that foreign direct investments had dropped by almost 50%.

“Key international agencies lowered Ukraine’s rating of economic freedom by 12 points and now Ukraine occupies the last place in Europe and one of the last places in the world,” she said. (tl/ez)