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 -------------- -------------- ¶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 KYIV 00000282 002 OF 003 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? -------------- - ¶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). KYIV 00000282 003 OF 003 ¶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