Viktor Yushchenko

Based on Wikipedia: Viktor Yushchenko

In September 2004, a Ukrainian presidential candidate sat down to dinner with senior government officials. Within hours, his face began to swell. Within days, he was fighting for his life in a Vienna hospital. Within weeks, laboratory tests would reveal something shocking: someone had poisoned Viktor Yushchenko with dioxin—a toxic compound found in Agent Orange—at concentrations fifty thousand times higher than normal. The poison left him disfigured, his once-handsome face cratered and scarred. But it didn't kill him. And it didn't stop him from becoming president.

This is the story of the man who survived an assassination attempt, led a revolution, and watched his political dreams crumble—all within the span of six years.

From Collective Farm to Central Bank

Viktor Yushchenko was born in 1954 in a small village in the Sumy region of northeastern Ukraine, then part of the Soviet Union. His parents were both teachers. His father, Andriy, had survived one of history's darkest chapters: captured by German forces during World War Two, he endured imprisonment in a series of Nazi concentration camps, including the notorious Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp. After liberation, Andriy returned home to teach English at the local school. Viktor's mother, Varvara, taught physics and mathematics at the same school.

This family background would later become politically significant. The Sumy region is predominantly Ukrainian-speaking, which distinguished Yushchenko from many Ukrainian politicians of his generation who grew up speaking Russian as their first language. And his father's imprisonment at Auschwitz would become a weapon that his opponents would absurdly try to turn against him.

After studying finance and economics, Yushchenko began his career in the most unglamorous way imaginable: as an accountant on a collective farm, known in Soviet terminology as a kolkhoz. He served his mandatory military conscription on the Soviet-Turkish border, then entered banking in 1976.

He rose steadily through the Soviet banking apparatus. By 1993, at thirty-nine years old, he was appointed governor of the National Bank of Ukraine—the country's central bank. Ukraine had only been independent for two years, and the young nation faced an economic nightmare.

Taming Hyperinflation

When Yushchenko took charge of the central bank, Ukraine was experiencing hyperinflation—a term economists use when prices rise so rapidly that money becomes nearly worthless. We're not talking about the kind of inflation where your grocery bill goes up ten or twenty percent. Ukrainian inflation exceeded ten thousand percent.

To put this in perspective: if you had saved enough money to buy a car in January, by December that same money might only buy you a pair of shoes. People rushed to spend their wages the moment they received them, because waiting even a day meant watching their purchasing power evaporate.

Yushchenko's central bank introduced a new national currency, the hryvnia, and implemented policies that gradually brought inflation under control. By the time he left the position, inflation had dropped to single digits. He also built a modern regulatory framework for commercial banking—the kind of institutional plumbing that most people never think about but that makes a functioning economy possible.

When Russia's financial system collapsed in 1998, sending shockwaves through the entire former Soviet region, Yushchenko managed to defend Ukraine's currency from the worst effects. His reputation as a competent economic manager was established.

Prime Minister and the Oligarchs

In December 1999, President Leonid Kuchma unexpectedly nominated Yushchenko to be prime minister. The previous candidate had failed to win parliamentary approval by a single vote, and Kuchma turned to the respected central banker.

Ukraine's economy improved under Yushchenko's leadership. But his government soon collided with a force that would define Ukrainian politics for decades: the oligarchs.

The term "oligarch" refers to the small group of businessmen who accumulated vast wealth during the chaotic privatization of state assets after the Soviet collapse. These weren't entrepreneurs who built companies from scratch. They were well-connected insiders who acquired factories, mines, and energy companies at a fraction of their value, often through murky deals with government officials. By the late 1990s, a handful of these oligarchs controlled huge swaths of Ukrainian industry and wielded enormous political influence.

Yushchenko's deputy prime minister, a firebrand politician named Yulia Tymoshenko, began confronting the oligarchs who controlled the coal mining and natural gas industries. The oligarchs struck back. In April 2001, parliament passed a vote of no confidence, removing Yushchenko from office. The vote was orchestrated by the Communist Party, which opposed his economic reforms, and by centrist factions aligned with the oligarchs.

Yushchenko was out. But he wasn't finished.

Building the Opposition

Cast out of government, Yushchenko began building a political movement. In 2002, he founded a coalition called Our Ukraine, which won more seats than any other party in that year's parliamentary elections. It wasn't a majority, and efforts to form a governing coalition failed. But Yushchenko had established himself as the face of opposition to President Kuchma.

By late 2002, an unlikely alliance was taking shape. Yushchenko joined with Tymoshenko, who had formed her own political bloc, and the leader of the Socialist Party to issue a joint statement announcing "the beginning of a state revolution in Ukraine." The communists eventually dropped out of this alliance, but the core partnership between Yushchenko and Tymoshenko would shape Ukrainian politics for years to come.

In July 2004, they formalized their alliance in a coalition they called Force of the People. The pact included a promise: if Yushchenko won the upcoming presidential election, he would nominate Tymoshenko as prime minister.

Their common enemy was the existing power structure—President Kuchma and his chosen successor, Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych. Two Viktors would compete for the presidency. Only one would survive.

The Poisoning

The 2004 presidential campaign was bitter from the start. Yushchenko couldn't rely on television coverage because the government controlled most major channels, so he built his campaign on direct voter contact—town halls, rallies, face-to-face meetings.

His opponent, Yanukovych, enjoyed friendly media coverage and didn't hesitate to use dirty tactics. At one point, Yanukovych accused Yushchenko of being "a Nazi"—a particularly grotesque charge given that Yushchenko's father had been imprisoned at Auschwitz and his mother had reportedly risked her life hiding three Jewish girls during the Nazi occupation.

Then, in early September, Yushchenko became violently ill.

He was rushed to a hospital in Vienna, where doctors found acute pancreatitis and mysterious abnormalities they couldn't explain. Yushchenko claimed he had been poisoned by government agents. His face began to change—becoming swollen, pockmarked, and discolored.

British and Dutch toxicologists examined him. They found something called chloracne, a distinctive skin condition caused by exposure to dioxin, the toxic compound found in the defoliant Agent Orange that the United States used in Vietnam. Tests revealed dioxin levels in Yushchenko's blood that were six thousand times above normal.

In December, doctors at the Vienna clinic announced their findings: Yushchenko had ingested a specific type of dioxin called TCDD at concentrations one thousand times higher than typical. A 2009 study published in The Lancet, one of the world's most prestigious medical journals, concluded that the dioxin "was so pure that it was definitely made in a laboratory."

The poisoning was traced to a dinner on September 5, 2004, with senior Ukrainian officials. Among those present was Volodymyr Satsyuk, the deputy chief of Ukraine's security service. Years later, when Ukrainian prosecutors sought to question him, Satsyuk had fled to Russia. Moscow refused to extradite him, citing his dual citizenship.

The assassination attempt failed. Yushchenko survived, though permanently disfigured. He continued his campaign.

The Orange Revolution

The presidential election's first round took place in October 2004. Neither candidate won an outright majority, triggering a runoff in November.

The runoff was a disaster of electoral fraud. International observers documented systematic violations: ballot stuffing, voters being turned away, official results that bore no relationship to reality in certain districts. The government declared Yanukovych the winner.

Ukrainians refused to accept it.

Hundreds of thousands of protesters flooded the streets of Kyiv and other cities. They wore orange, Yushchenko's campaign color. They set up tent cities in freezing November weather. They demanded a fair election.

This was the Orange Revolution.

After weeks of protests and international pressure, Ukraine's Supreme Court invalidated the fraudulent runoff and ordered a new vote. On December 26, 2004, Ukrainians voted again. This time, with proper monitoring, Yushchenko won decisively: fifty-two percent to forty-four percent.

The man who had been poisoned, whose face still bore the marks of the assassination attempt, would become president.

A Troubled Presidency

Viktor Yushchenko was inaugurated on January 23, 2005, before a crowd that included foreign dignitaries who had traveled to witness the peaceful conclusion of the Orange Revolution. He immediately set about reshaping the government, dismissing officials loyal to the old regime and making good on his promise to Tymoshenko by nominating her as prime minister.

But the revolutionary alliance began crumbling almost immediately.

Yushchenko and Tymoshenko, united in opposition, proved incapable of governing together. Their relationship was complicated by the appointment of Petro Poroshenko—a businessman and Tymoshenko rival—as Secretary of the Security and Defense Council. Tensions between the president's allies became public and vicious.

In September 2005, barely eight months into his presidency, Yushchenko fired Tymoshenko and her entire government. He accused her administration of corruption. She accused him of betraying the revolution. The partnership that had toppled the old regime was over.

The new prime minister, Yuriy Yekhanurov, barely scraped together enough parliamentary votes to form a government. Yushchenko's political capital was draining away.

Enemies Become Allies Become Enemies

What happened next would have seemed impossible during the heady days of the Orange Revolution.

In August 2006, Yushchenko appointed Viktor Yanukovych—the man he had defeated, the man widely believed to have benefited from a poisoning attempt against him—as prime minister.

This stunning reversal reflected the messy reality of Ukrainian parliamentary politics. Yanukovych's Party of Regions had won the most seats in the 2006 parliamentary elections. Yushchenko's Our Ukraine party had fallen to third place. Unable to form a stable coalition with Tymoshenko, Yushchenko turned to his former nemesis.

The alliance was never comfortable. By April 2007, Yushchenko signed an order dissolving parliament and calling new elections. His opponents argued the dissolution was illegal—that the constitutional conditions for such action hadn't been met. The country lurched from crisis to crisis: coalition disputes, legislative deadlock, competing claims of legitimacy.

The Fall

When Yushchenko first won the presidency in 2004, polls showed him with the support of roughly fifty-two percent of Ukrainians—the same percentage that had voted for him in the revote.

By the end of his term, that support had collapsed to below four percent.

The 2010 presidential election was a humiliation. Yushchenko finished in fifth place in the first round, winning just 5.5 percent of the vote. The top two finishers who advanced to the runoff were Yanukovych and Tymoshenko—the two people Yushchenko had battled against and alongside throughout his political career.

Yanukovych won the presidency.

Yushchenko attempted one more political comeback, leading Our Ukraine in the 2012 parliamentary elections. The party failed to win a single seat. His political career was over.

Legacy and Context

How did a man who survived poisoning and led a revolution fall so far, so fast?

The answer lies partly in the nature of revolutionary coalitions. People unite against a common enemy more easily than they unite around a common vision. Yushchenko, Tymoshenko, and their allies agreed that Kuchma's regime was corrupt and undemocratic. They agreed far less about what should replace it.

Yushchenko's vision was clear in broad strokes: orient Ukraine toward Europe, join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (commonly known as NATO), fight corruption, build Western-style institutions. But implementing this vision required political skills he seemed to lack. His inability to manage his own coalition, his constant feuding with Tymoshenko, his willingness to ultimately work with Yanukovych—all of this disillusioned supporters who had stood in the freezing streets of Kyiv demanding change.

There were also allegations of foreign money. In 2005, former president Leonid Kravchuk accused the exiled Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky of financing Yushchenko's presidential campaign. Documents showed money transfers from Berezovsky-controlled companies to Yushchenko's backers. Such foreign campaign financing is illegal under Ukrainian law. Berezovsky confirmed meetings with Yushchenko's representatives in London but refused to clarify whether the money had gone to the campaign.

And there was the question of corruption itself. In 2005, according to the former head of Ukraine's security service, Yushchenko personally intervened to block an investigation into allegedly fraudulent natural gas deals. The revolution that promised to clean up Ukraine seemed to be succumbing to the same forces it had opposed.

A Life Marked by History

Viktor Yushchenko's story is inseparable from the larger story of Ukraine's struggle for independence and identity.

His father survived Auschwitz. His mother hid Jewish children from the Nazis. He himself survived a poisoning that left him permanently disfigured. These experiences—the trauma of occupation, the courage of resistance, the price of standing against power—run through three generations of his family.

In 2005, Yushchenko joined with Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili to sign the Borjomi Declaration, calling for the creation of a Community of Democratic Choice—an alliance of democracies and emerging democracies around the Baltic, Black, and Caspian Seas. It was an ambitious vision of a democratic bulwark against authoritarian influence.

That vision would be tested severely in the years after Yushchenko left office. Yanukovych, who replaced him, would be ousted in 2014 after refusing to sign an association agreement with the European Union, triggering another revolution. Russia would respond by annexing Crimea and backing separatist forces in eastern Ukraine, beginning a conflict that continues to this day.

The questions that animated Yushchenko's political career—whether Ukraine would align with Europe or with Russia, whether it could build democratic institutions or remain captured by oligarchic interests, whether it could chart its own course as an independent nation—remain at the center of Ukrainian politics, and indeed at the center of European security.

Yushchenko himself faded from political relevance. But the revolution he led, the aspirations it represented, and the unfinished business it left behind continue to shape events. The Orange Revolution didn't deliver the transformation its supporters hoped for. But it demonstrated something important: that Ukrainians were willing to take to the streets, in the cold, in massive numbers, to demand their votes be counted and their voices heard.

They would do so again.