Was Yushchenko poisoned, and were the culprits ever prosecuted?

For many in the West, the disfigured face of a poisoned presidential candidate remains one of the most memorable images from Ukraine's Orange Revolution. The scandal surrounding Viktor Yushchenko's poisoning before the elections played some role in sparking the rev­olution.

On the evening of September 5, 2004, Yushchenko arrived at a villa outside Kyiv for a secret meeting with Victor Smishko, the head of the Ukrainian Security Services (SBU), and his deputy, Volodymyr Satsiuk. Yushchenko was accompanied by a prominent businessman supporter, David Zhvaniia, who also served as head of the parlia­mentary subcommittee on organized crime and police corruption. In all likelihood, the two of them wanted to establish connections with the security service in order to help prevent provocations during the elections. The four wined and dined (the main dish that fateful eve­ning was sushi), but the next morning Yushchenko became violently ill with abdominal pain and nausea.

To Ukrainian doctors, the symptoms seemed to indicate food poisoning or stomach flu, but Yushchenko's oligarch supporters had him airlifted to a private clinic in Austria for treatment. After Yushchenko's face became covered with lesions and half-paralyzed, more specific tests showed that the level of dioxin in his blood was some 50,000 times higher than normal.³ The swelling of his abdom­inal organs indicated that the opposition candidate had unwittingly consumed dioxin with food or drink. The kind of dioxin used, TCDD, was widely known as a poisonous component of Agent Orange, the controversial herbicide sprayed by the US Army during the Vietnam War and which was later linked to multiple health problems. It was not immediately lethal, but it would certainly have incapacitated Yushchenko had it been left untreated.

However, Austrian and later Swiss doctors managed to stabilize him, and he returned to the campaign trail after a week, with an IV catheter in his back. He was required to return to Europe a few times for follow-up treatment. Yushchenko gave a speech in parlia­ment accusing the powers that be of poisoning him. In light of the suspiciously timed flight of the deputy security service head and villa owner, Volodymyr Satsiuk, to Russia, Yushchenko's speech rallied supporters of the opposition. The poisoning also grabbed the attention of the international media, serving as further proof of the outgoing regime's criminal nature.

However, Yushchenko's opponents immediately questioned his version of events, blaming his blisters and lesions on sushi poi­soning or a Botox injection gone wrong. An initial parliamentary commission of inquiry suggested in 2004 that a herpes infection was the likely cause, while a second claimed in 2009 that the candidate's team had falsified his blood tests by adding dioxin. Significantly, a criminal investigation into the poisoning made little progress, even during Yushchenko's presidency (2005-2010), ostensibly because of Russia's refusal to extradite several key figures. In the meantime, Yushchenko's companion at the dinner, David Zhvaniia, had a falling out with him and also started speaking out against the poi­soning theory.

Public interest in the investigation into the poisoning declined as disillusionment with the new Orange authorities set in, especially after Yushchenko ceased being a major political player in 2010.