Fateful dinner party that brought disfigurement in its wake...
Nick Paton Walsh in Moscow
Monday December 13, 2004
The Guardian
It was no routine dinner party, its guests as distinguished as its agenda was questionable. On the night of September 5, the leader of the Ukrainian opposition, Viktor Yushchenko, met Igor Smeshko, the head of the Ukrainian security service, the SBU, and his deputy, Volodymyr Stasiuk, reportedly a confidant of the outgoing president, Leonid Kuchma.
The opposition had requested the meeting to discuss how the SBU, the successor to the KGB, would act during the forthcoming electoral campaign. Mr Yushchenko was ahead in most of the polls, and presumably sought assurances that the SBU would stay neutral.
At Mr Smeshko's luxurious dacha outside Kiev, they ate and drank until the small hours. But it was not until Mr Yushchenko returned home that the first traces came to light of the poisoning that was to nearly take his life.
Kateryna, his wife, told ABC on Friday: "I thought there was something different about my husband when he came home that night - because he has never taken any medicine, he's a very healthy man. And I tasted some medicine on his breath, on his lips. And I asked him about it, he brushed it away, saying there is nothing."
It was a typical reaction from a man whose tanned, square-jawed face had helped catapult him from being a former national bank chief to presidential contender in four years. A healthy, vigorous man at 50, he listed skiing and basketball among his hobbies.
So when that night the illness first struck, he shrugged it off as bad food poisoning. Yet the abdominal pains grew in intensity, interrupting his heavy campaigning. By September 10, local doctors had recommended he seek expert treatment abroad.
When he arrived at the private Rudolfinerhaus clinic in Vienna, his body was in an almost total state of collapse. He was groggy, and had the same chronic abdominal pain, and his organs appeared close to collapse.
His blood tests showed severe abnormalities. His face and upper chest were covered in unusual lesions. His digestive tract and stomach were speckled with ulcers and bleeding abrasions. Eight days of intensive tests followed, yet the doctors, led by the director of the clinic, Michael Zimpfer, could not pin down the cause of his illness. They said at the time that he had arrived too late after falling ill for any poison he had ingested to still be in his bloodstream.
Without Mr Yushchenko, the opposition's campaign was faltering, so he opted for a plan to allow him to get back on the election trail. Doctors inserted a drip into his spine so he could receive constant painkillers.
Three days after checking himself out of the Vienna clinic, he stood before parliament and accused the government of trying to kill him. "Look at my face," he said. "Note my articulation. This is one-hundredth of the problems that I've had. I want to know the names of the assassins very much. But even without any investigation the answer is simple - the killer is the regime. I survived because my guardian angels were not asleep at the time. Every one of you is next, however."
On September 28, he returned to Vienna for further tests. The doctors were no nearer establishing the cause. They suspected foul play, but had no evidence of poison, instead suggesting various rare diseases, such as the condition rosacea, might be to blame for his facial disfigurement.
He pressed on with campaigning, but the disfigurement remained the unanswered question behind his election campaign and the 16-day crisis that followed.
Days after parliament passed constitutional changes, the proof that doctors at the Rudolfinerhaus had sought for weeks finally emerged. "We could do a diagnosis and check his symptoms," said Dr Zimpfer.
"But we had no experience in advanced chemical weapons or biological weapons. We made an international call to several experts in Europe and the US."
He said they had been able to pinpoint that the poison was based on dioxin. The doctors said on Saturday he had arrived in Vienna with levels of dioxin in his blood a thousand times above normal.
The Yushchenko campaign refuses to name any suspects for the poisoning. "Mr Yushchenko does not want revenge," said spokeswoman Irina Gerashenko, who said the prosecutor general's renewed investigation should make conclusions alone. She added: "Then the courts can decide."
