The Dirtiest Trick

The faces of great leaders are weathered by the years, absorbing and reflecting the pain of their people. Viktor Yushchenko, the opposition leader running for President of Ukraine, hasn't had a chance to demonstrate greatness, but almost overnight his handsome face turned into a gray, pitted, suppurating mask — a road map to his anguished and divided country. Now doctors have confirmed the cause of that sudden transformation. "There is no doubt about the fact that Mr. Yushchenko's disease is caused by poisoning and that dioxin is one of the agents," said Dr. Michael Zimpfer, director of Vienna's Rudolfinerhaus clinic, where Yushchenko has been treated off and on since he fell grievously ill Sept. 5. "We have identified the cause. We suspect involvement of a third party."

Yushchenko has no doubt about who that party is. He blames unnamed agents of the Ukrainian government (see interview), the same government that allowed rampant ballot stuffing to throw the Nov. 21 runoff election to Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych — Yushchenko's opponent and President Leonid Kuchma's handpicked successor. Two weeks ago, Ukraine's Supreme Court voided that result and called a new vote for Dec. 26. Since then Yushchenko has continued to gain strength — he says he'll take 60% of the vote — while Yanukovych mutters about a "soft coup d'état," and Kuchma keeps searching for a way out.

The political stakes are extremely high — a nation's fate is at stake — but Zimpfer's announcement on Saturday proved that for Yushchenko, the personal stakes may be even higher. The amount of toxin in his bloodstream is so great that tests could not measure it. Had the dose been any larger, he would likely be dead. And though he is recovering — his intense back pain subsiding, liver function returning, energy rebounding — his long-term prospects are bleak.

"I don't want to scare him or his family," Zimpfer told TIME, "but there will be
health problems."

Dioxins are a family of toxic chemicals produced in some manufacturing and as an ingredient in weapons of war. One well-known dioxin is the active ingredient in Agent Orange, the infamous defoliant used by the U.S. military during the Vietnam War, which was linked to high rates of lymphoma, soft-tissue sarcomas and cancer of the lung and prostate. People poisoned by dioxins released during industrial accidents, such as the 1976 explosion at a chemical plant in Seveso, Italy, developed the skin disease chloracne, which has ravaged Yushchenko's face and also causes severe joint pain and fatigue. The condition can take years to improve. "There is an increased risk of cancer and other conditions," Professor John Henry, former head of the U.K.'s National Poisons Service, told Nature magazine last month.

While deliberate poisoning hasn't been proven, it isn't unknown in Russia and its former satellites. In Chechnya in March 2002, a rebel commander named Khattab died after handling a letter coated with an unidentified poison; the Russian foreign-intelligence service fsb claimed credit. In July 2003, Russian investigative journalist Yuri Shchekochikin died from a sudden, agonizing disease whose symptoms included blistering; doctors blamed an allergic reaction. In Yushchenko's case, forensic scientists will now try to determine when and how he was poisoned, though fingering a culprit may be next to impossible.

The poisoning has already given him martyrlike status among his supporters, but it also raises questions about whether his health will allow him to serve with sustained vigor. Though he insists it will, those kinds of doubts are dangerous in an unstable environment such as Ukraine.

For weeks, Yushchenko has been sustained by adrenalin and the certainty of making history. "During these 17 days we have built a new country," he told a jubilant crowd in Kiev's Independence Square last Wednesday. Hours before, the Ukrainian parliament, with the backing of Kuchma, had passed a package of electoral and constitutional reforms that boosted Yushchenko's chances in the Dec. 26 vote. "We'll remember [these days,]" Yushchenko predicted, "as the best in our lives."