UKRAINE: YUSHCHENKO POISONING CASE REMAINS

C O N F I D E N T I A L SECTION 01 OF 03 KYIV 000282

SIPDIS

SIPDIS

E.O. 12958: DECL: 02/01/2017
TAGS: PGOV PHUM UP
SUBJECT: UKRAINE: YUSHCHENKO POISONING CASE REMAINS
UNSOLVED TWO YEARS AFTER HIS INAUGURATION

Classified By: Ambassador, reason 1.4 (b,d)


1. (SBU) Summary. More than two years after his
inauguration as President, Viktor Yushchenko's face no longer
has the huge chloracne bumps and pallid grey color resulting
from his poisoning by dioxin in September 2004, and his Swiss
doctors claim that 80 percent of the dioxin has left his
system. Despite Yushchenko's claims in December 2006 that
Ukrainian legal authorities had all the evidence they need to
press charges in the case and only lacked "courage" to
initiate action, however, the prosecutor general's office
(PGO) seems no closer to solving the case now than it did two
years ago. With Yushchenko clearly focused on his September
5, 2004 dinner at the dacha of then Security Service deputy
head Satsyuk, who reportedly fled to Moscow after the Orange
Revolution, Prosecutor General Medvedko announced January 30
that he was pursuing involvement of a mysterious masseur, as
well as an alleged fish dinner Yushchenko had prior to the
Satsyuk session.


2. (C) Comment: The Presidential Secretariat's newfound
openness regarding Yushchenko's recent treatment in
Switzerland comes after two years of unpublicized trips which
raised questions about the extent to which the poisoning's
lingering effects may have limited Yushchenko's capacity to
act decisively as President. In meetings and pubilc
appearances, Yushchenko does not appear to be in pain or
incapacitated in any way, although we continue to hear that
he continues to take medication for pain. Yushchenko's
frustrated public comments about the case and PGO were an
indication of the limited extent to which he has influence
over the PGO, even in a case involving the poisoning of the
head of state. The PGO's lack of progress in what many had
presumed would have been its top priority after Yushchenko
became President in January 2005 mirrors the lack of progress
in the Gongadze murder case, which the newly inaugurated
Yushchenko said should serve as the measure of the
effectiveness of delivering justice in the new Ukraine. End
Summary and Comment.

New transparency for Presidential Medical updates
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3. (SBU) Analysis by a Dutch lab in December 2004 suggested
that Yushchenko had the second highest levels of dioxin ever
recorded in a human, 100,000 units per gram of blood fat, or
6000 times normal (note: average levels of 15 to 45 units
accumulate over time as industrial pollutants affect the food
chain). The most visible impact of the poisoning affected
Yushchenko's scarred and pallid facial skin, with huge,
bulging chloracne on his face and neck; the cold of winter
turned his skin a purplish grey. Yushchenko's doctors and
family have never released any assessments of damage to
Yushchenko's internal organs. While Yushchenko told a
visiting Congressional delegation in early February 2005 that
his doctors had promised his facial skin would be "close to
normal in six months" and showed changes in the base of his
fingernails as evidence that the dioxin had started working
its way out of his system, his chloracne only started
subsiding significantly a year later, in 2006. By the end of
2006, the chloracne had essentially disappeared, leaving the
man who until August 2004 had been Ukraine's most handsome,
smooth-skinned politician with baggy jowls and a
significantly pitted but more normal complexion.


4. (C) For two years after his inauguration, Yushchenko made
a series of unpublicized, multi-day trips to Switzerland for
treatment of his dioxin poisoning. Ukrainians would not know
when their president was out of the country, and some visits
only became known to the Embassy by chance: first Lady
Kateryna Yushchenko's passing mention to U/S Dobriansky of a
hotel-lobby encounter with previously anti-Yushchenko media
mogul Rabinovitch in Geneva while on one of the 2005
unannounced visits; then Presidential Secretariat Rybachuk's
January 2006 comment to us that Yushchenko would be
"completely unavailable" for several days that week;
Tymoshenko adviser Nemyria's revelation on July 6, 2006, the
day Moroz defected to join a Regions' led coalition in
exchange for becoming Speaker, that Yushchenko had made
desperate calls from Switzerland to Tymoshenko and Socialist
leader Moroz in a failed last-minute effort to salvage the
aborted Our Ukraine-Tymoshenko Bloc-Socialist coalition.
Yushchenko's previously unknown out-of-the country absence on
such a crucial day for the country's political development
and his own political fortunes was a reminder that his
poisoning, its unknown impact on his stamina, and the time
demands of his out of country treatments remained an elusive
X factor in his ability to act effectively as President.


5. (SBU) In a departure from two years of secretiveness, the
Presidential Secretariat announced in mid-January that

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Yushchenko would travel to Switzerland January 19-23 for a
series of tests and provided an interim update while he was
still in Switzerland that doctors had determined Yushchenko
was in good health. Swiss doctor Jean Sora subsequently
announced January 28 that 80 percent of the dioxin had left
Yushchenko's body and that Yushchenko could work for extended
periods of time; presidential press secretary Iryna Vannikova
added January 29 that the medical tests in Geneva showed no
organ malfunctions. (Note: based on the reported December
2004 dioxin levels, even an 80 percent reduction suggests
Yushchenko's dioxin levels could remain as high as 20,000
units, or 1200 times normal).

The butler in the dacha, fish, or the masseur?
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6. (SBU) After little public commentary in 2005-06 about
progress, or the lack thereof, in the poisoning
investigation, Yushchenko weighed in during his December 14,
2006, end-of-year press conference, sparking a flurry of
defensive, speculative comments by current and past
authorities. Yushchenko told reporters that the
investigation had established who had poisoned him and that
it would not be hard to prove: "There is enough information
today to handcuff the people concerned, some of whom are
outside of Ukraine. The last facts as to who put which dish
on the table, and where the poison could have been put into
the food, have been established." In a remarkable comment
regarding the poisoning of the head of state, Yushchenko
suggested the key question concerned prosecutorial will: "Do
those people have enough courage to do what is required?"


9. (SBU) General Prosecutor Medvedko, who inherited the case
when he was promoted in November 2005, had himself claimed in
a September 9, 2006 press conference in Kyiv that the
investigation had determined the circumstances of the
poisoning and that the remaining task was to find the
conclusive evidence. However, Medvedko backed away from
Yushchenko's assertions the next day, December 15, while in
Donetsk. Denying that the GPO was a half-step away from
solving the case, Medvedko claimed that the SBU, not the GPO,
should investigate the case (note: the cautious Medvedko
started his prosectorial career in Donetsk and Luhansk, where
he chaired a committee involved in the initially botched
prosecution of the 2001 Alexandrov murder, Ukraine's second
most well-known journalistic death after the Gongadze case.
Medvedko denied involvement in the falsification of evidence
in the Alexandrov case and blamed the framing of an innocent
man on other law enforcement officials).


10. (SBU) Medvedko's deputy Rinat Kuzmin, a Donetsk native
appointed Deputy General Prosecutor for criminal
investigations after Yanukovych and Regions returned to power
and prone to politically-motivated comments about orange
politicians, further distanced the GPO from Yushchenko's
comments on December 26. Kuzmin claimed the investigation
had no information about who, where, and how Yushchenko had
been poisoned, that none of the law enforcement or
intelligence agencies had such information, and that the case
was too politicized. Proceeding to politicize the poisoning
himself, Kuzmin revived a 2004 blue camp allegation that
Yushchenko could have been poisoned from within the orange
camp, maintained that it was improper to focus only on one
scenario (i.e., the dinner at Satsyuk's dacha),and said
other scenarios should be examined (note: Kuzmin served as
Kyiv Prosecutor from 2003-04 until being dismissed after the
Orange Revolution; he was a close ally of Hennadiy Vasilyev,
another Donetsk native who served as a politicized General
Prosecutor from 2003-04 until he was dismissed by Kuchma as
part of the December 8, 2004 compromise deal).


11. (SBU) Former SBU Chief Ihor Smeshko, a guest at
Yushchenko's September 5 dinner at his deputy Satsyuk's
dacha, broke two years of silence on the poisoning January 26
in an interview with "Fakty and Kommentarii," owned by Kuchma
son-in-law Viktor Pinchuk. Smeshko claimed that Yushchenko
and PGO investigators had been captive to Yushchenko's
statement that the poisoning attempt had been committed by
the "criminal government" (i.e., the Kuchma regime then in
power). He suggested that Yushchenko could have been
poisoned 90 minutes prior to the Satsyuk dinner, when
Yushchenko dined at the dacha of the owner of the "Foxtrot"
appliance chain, claiming that Yushchenko was served trout on
a separate plate, a dish no one else shared (note: Smeshko
claimed to a NY Times reporter in early 2005 that all
attendees at the Satsyuk dinner had eaten food served
communally. Smeshko was no friend of Satsyuk, a close
SPDU(o) ally of Kuchma Chief of Staff Medvedchuk who had been
installed by Medvedchuk as Smeshko's deputy at the SBU
against Smeshko's will and fled to Russia after the Orange
Revolution).

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12. (SBU) Medvedko held another press conference January 30,
claiming two new suspects had been established as having been
involved in the poisoning case, stating: "one of them is a
masseur." The unnamed masseur left Kyiv in September 2006 to
a destination unknown to Ukrainian police, added Medvedko,
who did not elaborate on why Ukrainian authorities had not
known of or taken into custody the supposed suspect in the
two years after the poisoning. Medvedko also said that the
PGO was examining Smeshko's contention about the Foxtrot
dinner.

Will poisoning ever be solved?
--------------


13. (SBU) Note: Yushchenko's September 2004 poisoning took
him off the campaign trail for six weeks, until just prior to
the first round of the 2004 Presidential election (October
31, 2004). On the evening of the second round election day,
November 21, 2004, a car parked for eight hours in front of
Yushchenko's campaign headquarters in Podil turned out to
have three kilos of hexogen-based plastik explosive in its
trunk. When police searched the car and found the
explosives, they detained two individuals carrying fake
Russian and Ukrainian passports, Russian citizens Mikhail
Shugai and Marat Moskvitin. Initially charged with an
attempted terrorist act, smuggling of explosives, and use of
fake documents, Shugai and Moskvitin were convicted of the
latter two charges in June 2006 (the attempted terrorism
charge was dropped) and sentenced to four and six years,
respectively.


14. (SBU) Comment: In the immediate aftermath of the arrests
in 2004, which occurred hours before the Orange Revolution
began, many Ukrainians viewed the apparent foiled bombing
incident as a potential follow-up attempt on Yushchenko's
life after the September poisoning. Over time, however, no
apparent connections emerged, and the trial of Shugai and
Moskvitin did not uncover who allegedly ordered a potential
attack on Yushchenko's campaign headquarters. While Shugai
and Moskvitin were convicted to multi-year sentences in June
2006, it is not clear at this point whether anyone will ever
be prosecuted for one of the highest profile political
poisonings in recent decades.


15. (U) Visit Embassy Kyiv's classified website:
www.state.sgov.gov/p/eur/kiev.
Taylor