Viktor Yushchenko

Viktor Yushchenko was poisoned with dioxin during the 2004 Ukrainian election campaign, won the rerun after the Orange Revolution, and governed a country his own coalition spent five years quarrelling over. He was a central banker by training who introduced the hryvnia and stabilised the currency after the post-Soviet collapse, then served as prime minister and was dismissed by parliament. In September 2004, during the campaign against Viktor Yanukovych, he fell ill after a dinner with the head of the security service; the diagnosis was TCDD dioxin poisoning at concentrations thousands of times normal, and his face was disfigured for years. He campaigned anyway. When the run-off was declared for Yanukovych amid evidence of fraud, hundreds of thousands occupied the Maidan in the cold for weeks until the supreme court annulled it; Yushchenko won the rerun with fifty-two per cent. His presidency was consumed by feuding with his own prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko, two gas cut-offs by Russia, and the financial crisis. He took five per cent in 2010 and Yanukovych won. The poisoning has never been prosecuted; the suspects went to Russia. He is a beekeeper and a collector of Ukrainian folk antiquities. His presidency's lasting act was probably the recognition of the Holodomor as a genocide, which he pursued internationally and which Russia opposed. The Orange Revolution is the direct ancestor of the Maidan of 2013, and the same square served both. He supported Petro Poroshenko afterwards and has largely stayed out of politics. His hryvnia is still the currency. The dioxin used was of a purity that suggested a state laboratory rather than an improvised poison, which is a large part of why the case has never been closed. Ukrainian prosecutors reopened it again after 2014 without result.

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