For weeks, his face appeared on television screens and newspaper front pages across the world as he led Ukraine’s pro-democracy movement in its extraordinary campaign for fair elections.
On Saturday, the truth was revealed about what, almost overnight, transformed Viktor Yuschenko from the handsome, suntanned politician into the pockmarked and bloated figure he is today.
He was poisoned, probably by being given food laced with deadly dioxins in an effort by his political foes to crush his bid for power.
At a hastily organised press conference in a Vienna hospital, his doctors confirmed what Yuschenko has been claiming.
”There is no doubt about the fact that Yuschenko’s disease has been caused by a case of poisoning by dioxin,” said Dr Michael Zimpfer, director of the private Rudolfinerhaus clinic.
”We suspect involvement of an external party, but we cannot answer as to who cooked what or who was with him while he ate.”
Zimpfer said tests showed the poison was taken orally and that the levels in the politician’s blood and tissue was a thousand times above normal.
”It would be quite easy to administer this amount in a soup,” Zimpfer said.
When first seen by the Austrian doctors, Yuschenko was in a ”critical stage”, the doctor said. ”The criminal investigation does not fit within our purview but … there is suspicion of third-party involvement.”
If the dose had been any higher, he added, Yuschenko would have died.
The development dragged the man and the 16-day political crisis that gripped Ukraine after last month’s rigged election into the Cold War world of a John le Carré novel.
A senior official in the Yuschenko camp told The Observer newspaper that the poisoning was ”clearly planned by professionals”, perhaps former employees of the KGB.
The source added the poison is called T-2, or ”yellow rain” — linked to dioxins and the former Soviet Union’s answer to the United States’s Agent Orange — and that the CIA was consulted in trying to identify it.
A criminal investigation carried out by the old government before the elections concluded that the opposition leader’s illness was a severe case of herpes. Other explanations have tried to suggest a bad dish of sushi was to blame.
Yuschenko has always insisted the illness was the result of poisoning. He said he had been taken ill after a dinner on September 5 with senior Ukrainian security officials, including the head of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), Ihor Smeshko.
He told Parliament 10 days after falling ill and after his first visit to Vienna: ”Look at my face. Note my articulation. This is one-100th of the problems that I’ve had. This is not a problem of political cuisine as such. We are talking about the Ukrainian political kitchen where assassinations are ordered.”
On Saturday night, the source in the Yuschenko campaign said he does not think the Russian government — the firm and overt backers of Yuschenko’s opponent, Viktor Yanukovich — were involved.
But he added: ”This [poisoning] was the option for people who did not want him to qualify” as president. He said the campaign had been receiving information about an attempt to assassinate Yuschenko since July from various sources.
Yuschenko’s symptoms are consistent with dioxin poisoning, which produces a severe form of acne called chloracne. Yet this can happen months after exposure, when the body seeks to rid itself of the poison through the skin.
Yuschenko’s wife, Kateryna, a former US State Department official, said she first feared he may have been poisoned after he returned from the September 5 dinner with Smeshko and his deputy, Volodymyr Stasiuk, regarded in the Ukrainian media as outgoing president Leonid Kuchma’s man in the SBU.
The meeting, which took place at Stasiuk’s country house, was arranged by the opposition to discuss the SBU’s role in the forthcoming election campaign.
Yuschenko’s wife told ABC News that when he came home that evening ”there was something different about my husband — because he has never taken any medicine, he’s a very healthy man”.
She added: ”I tasted some medicine on his breath, on his lips. And I asked him about it, he brushed it away, saying there is nothing.”
After five days of terrible abdominal pain, he was taken to the Rudolfinerhaus clinic, where doctors began emergency tests. His skin was covered in peculiar lesions, his digestive tract spotted with ulcers. Yet the symptoms defied diagnosis over eight days.
The opposition leader, who had been barred from most of his election TV campaigning by the government and so badly needed to attend rallies to drum up support, then checked himself out and hit the road.
Just two weeks later, he was back in Vienna, requiring such enormous doses of morphine that his respiratory system was in danger of collapse.
Doctors took the risky move of allowing a small tube to be inserted into his spine to constantly feed him medication so he could continue campaigning.
The medication and illness took its toll. When The Observer met Yuschenko in October, he appeared weak and tired as a make-up artist spent 40 minutes readying him for a rare TV appearance. The make-up itself required a heavy-duty fixing spray to keep it on his pockmarked face.
Since then, his facial lesions have worsened, a large black patch appearing and spreading over his nose. While his inner circle shy away from talking about his health, some have said he has been suffering from intense pain that keeps him awake at night.
Yet the former head of the national bank has confronted the disease in a fighting spirit, appearing during the mass protests without cosmetics to tell them that his scarred face is that of the dirty politics of Ukraine.
It is uncertain what permanent effect the poison will have. Dioxins, it is feared, can increase the chance of cancer. Yet doctors insist his health is improving.
Zimpfer said although Yuschenko was in a critical stage when he came to the hospital, he was not ”on the verge of dying” and is now in a ”satisfactory condition”.
The senior source in the campaign said he was ”lucky” to get help from US, Israeli and Austrian doctors, which appears to have saved his life.
He is expected to return to Ukraine on Sunday or Monday, yet it is not known if his skin, like the politics of the country he is expected to lead after Boxing Day’s re-run of the elections, will rid itself of the scarring. — Guardian Unlimited Â