Third Ukrainian President Viktor Yuschenko (2005-2010) is ready to undergo medical tests as part of the investigation into a criminal case on his poisoning, his lawyer Hanna Vronska has said.
"Viktor Yuschenko is ready to continue cooperating with the investigators, and is ready to take a blood test once again. But there are certain legal technicalities here. The Prosecutor General’s Office insists that a repeated examination be conducted. This means that it’s necessary to consider the issues that were raised by investigators and experts five years ago, but the examination will be conducted by new experts. And it’s unclear how the old questions will be agreed with new blood samples. Time has passed, and the level of dioxin in [Yuschenko’s] blood changed," she said in an interview with the Ukraina Moloda newspaper."
Vronska also noted that Yuschenko insisted that a new examination should be conducted and that new questions should be posed to experts taking into account the time that had passed.
As reported, on November 7, newly appointed Prosecutor General Viktor Pshonka confirmed that an additional test of Yuschenko’s blood should be conducted as part of the investigation into his poisoning. He said that the former president had already been invited three times to take a blood test.
Yuschenko’s press secretary Iryna Vannykova said that "attempts to throw into question the results of an examination conducted on the basis of studies by foreign laboratories, or the carrying out of a repeated examination after four years of investigation may cast doubt on Ukraine’s readiness to recognize international law and lead to charges of using the investigation for the purpose of political persecution."
She said that the examinations conducted abroad at the official level had been completely overseen by the Prosecutor General’s Office, the Ukrainian government and Ukrainian medical and expert institutions.
On September 5, 2004, then presidential candidate Yuschenko was taken ill after having dinner with the leadership of the Security Service of Ukraine. He was hospitalized in Vienna on September 10. Doctors said Yuschenko had been poisoned with dioxin. Moreover, they said the poison had been administered five days before his hospitalization. After that, a number of medical tests were conducted. An examination conducted late in May 2006 confirmed the presence of dioxin in Yuschenko’s body.
In November 2009, the Verkhovna Rada’s temporary investigative commission conducting an inquiry into Yuschenko’s poisoning in 2004 stressed the need to conduct new studies of the tests that would confirm the scenario of the poisoning.
