Ukraine’s Yushchenko More Sure of Poisoning

KIEV, Ukraine — Presidential contender Viktor Yushchenko said Friday that he was increasingly certain he had been poisoned in an effort to assassinate him, and he temporarily left the campaign trail to spend the weekend at a private clinic in Vienna where he was to undergo further medical tests.

Yushchenko, widely viewed as a pro-Western democratic reformer, will face Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovich in a Dec. 26 revote ordered by Ukraine’s Supreme Court, which ruled their first runoff, in late November, invalid due to fraud.

With parliament’s approval Wednesday of electoral law changes designed to prevent cheating, the focus of political energy here has shifted back from street protests to campaign activities. Both men said Friday that they were willing to debate each other. But Yushchenko later interrupted his activities to fly to Austria for the tests and treatment.

The opposition leader said at a news conference early Friday that forensic tests concerning his mysterious illness were underway and that results might be available soon. Illness struck him suddenly in September, affecting several of his organs and leaving his face disfigured with pockmarks and cysts.

“I don’t just believe, but this belief is growing and growing, that what happened to me was an attempt to politically destroy a politician with opposing views,” Yushchenko said. “The aim was to kill me.”

Yushchenko has raised the allegation of poisoning before, and authorities have denied it, with some pro-government politicians ridiculing the idea. Doctors at the clinic have said they have been unable to prove or rule out the possibility that Yushchenko was poisoned. But in recent days they have stressed that his facial appearance could have been caused by dioxin poisoning and that this is one possibility being looked at.

Nikolai Korpan, the doctor at Vienna’s Rudolfinerhaus clinic who oversaw Yushchenko’s treatment, told reporters Wednesday that doctors were working on three poisoning theories, including one involving dioxin.

Yushchenko said that “dozens, even more than 100 poisons, were tested for.”

“I’m in good physical shape,” he added. “I’m on my way to full recovery.”

Clinic director Michael Zimpfer said that in October, doctors attached a device to Yushchenko’s back to inject anesthetic for his overpowering back pain. Zimpfer said he then traveled with Yushchenko to Ukraine to ensure that no problems arose.

“It’s a tricky procedure,” he said. “It’s dangerous. But it worked very fine.”

Yushchenko no longer needs the device but is reportedly taking other medication.

Speaking at his own news conference in Kiev, Yanukovich on Friday accused Yushchenko of seeking to impose the desires of his supporters on the whole country. Yushchenko is strongest in western Ukraine, and Yanukovich is popular in the east, which has a close cultural affinity with Russia.

The Yushchenko camp’s approach to the rematch amounts to “all-out totalitarianism on behalf of voters in western Ukraine,” Yanukovich said.

“Violence is being applied to voters and human rights are being violated,” he said, in a mirror image of the charges levied against his own camp by the opposition and Western election monitors after the Nov. 21 balloting.

“If they call it fair elections and if they think that this will bring them victory, I think they will get a reaction from eastern and southern Ukraine that they will never be able to handle. The people, my voters, will never acquiesce in such methods of so-called, false democracy.”

Yanukovich, who is on leave from his position as prime minister for the rest of the campaign, narrowly won the November vote, according to the official count. That election was a runoff after the initial round, held Oct. 31 with a field of 24 candidates.

After the Nov. 21 results were announced, protests erupted in Kiev and more than two weeks of massive demonstrations ensued. The movement was dubbed the “Orange Revolution,” for Yushchenko’s campaign color.

The Supreme Court eventually threw out the election results, and parliament approved a compromise reform package that reduced presidential powers and strengthened anti-fraud measures, including tight restrictions on the use of absentee ballots. Such ballots were allegedly abused on a massive scale in the earlier voting.

Outgoing President Leonid D. Kuchma and Yushchenko endorsed the package, and Yanukovich rapidly lost support at high political levels in the capital. He angrily lashed back Friday at Kuchma and other former supporters who had abandoned him.

“There is no president in Ukraine today,” he said. “Do you see where the president is? Did you see where the president was during the Orange Coup?”

Yanukovich said he was “very disappointed” that he had “trusted these cowards, these betrayers I worked with.”

He accused former supporters of having “started destroying me, as the candidate who won the runoff,” and charged that “the opposition and the betraying authorities united and started beating me up.”

Calling for a debate with his foe, Yanukovich said: “I can say only one thing, whether he likes it or not: I dare this coward to a debate, in any format, in any location and in the presence of any audience.”

Yushchenko, who was accompanied to the Vienna clinic by his U.S.-born wife, Kateryna Chumachenko, told reporters that “everything is going well.”

“I plan to live for a long time and I plan to live happily,” he said.

The weekend edition of the Austrian daily Der Standard, available on its website Friday evening, quoted Korpan as saying that recent blood tests had strengthened suspicions of dioxin poisoning but that doctors were not yet ready to say for sure what had caused Yushchenko’s illness.

“The whole affair is not only highly explosive medically, but also politically and criminally,” Korpan said. “Therefore we must be 100% certain.... We need a few tissue samples from him, and then it will take a few days until we have a conclusive diagnosis.”

Chumachenko, in an interview Friday on ABC’s “Good Morning America,” said she noticed a medicinal taste on his lips when she kissed her husband on the night they believe he was poisoned.

“And I asked him about it. He brushed it away, saying there is nothing,” she said.

“But the next day he did become ill, and over the next two to three days he got worse and worse, until we finally had to rush him to a hospital. And there we were told that if we had only waited a few hours longer, we might have lost him.”

Sonya Yee in The Times’ Vienna Bureau contributed to this report.