Anyone Remember Viktor Yushchenko?
I don’t know if any of you remember Viktor Yushchenko, but Seed Magazine has an article up on his poisoning while he was running for president in Ukraine.
Tasteless but highly toxic, the dioxin Yushchenko ingested was administered in a dose probably less than 1 mg. A drop in a bowl of soup would have gone undetected, said Prodanchuk. Yushchenko was served a rather large dose, roughly a quarter of the lethal quantity for rhesus monkeys. Once ingested, the dioxin—a fat-soluble chemical—moves from the blood to fatty tissues. The body then tries to eliminate the dioxin through its sebaceous glands, which are what causes skin to grow oily or pimply. Half a dose of dioxin gets eliminated every few years but never completely rids itself, Prodanchuk said.
The dioxin found in Yushchenko’s blood—pure 2,3,7,8-TCDD—is “the most potent of all the dioxins,” said Daniel Hryhorczuk, professor of environmental and occupational health sciences at the University of Illinois. “I doubt someone could have been sophisticated enough to give a dose in the range where you’d be guaranteed to maim and not kill,” added Hryhorczuk, implying that the intent was most likely Yushchenko’s death, not disfigurement. Hryhorczuk said the dioxin was probably not a homegrown concoction made in Ukraine, but rather, the work of a foreign laboratory. “To make a compound this pure requires a lot of sophistication.”
The thing that just blew me away about this situation was that it sounded like something straight out of a Tom Clancy novel. Someone tried to knock of the future president of a country, by poisoning no less. For a few days, we heard all about in the news, but the story quickly fell off the radar and I’ve heard barely a blip since. Who did it? It wouldn’t surprise me in the least if the US (or even Ukraine) knew who did it but is keeping quiet for political reasons. As the article points out, perhaps the prime suspect is Russia. What could possibly be done? Go to war?
This whole thing screams of a huge conspiracy. As the article discusses, the poison used had to be made by a country with high amounts of scientific sophistication. The article mentioned that all of Ukraine didn’t even have the equipment to analyze the substance and had to send off samples to other European countries for testing.
I don’t know if we’ll ever learn the truth, but I imagine if we did, it would be as shocking and audacious as any Tom Clancy book.