The Prophecy

The people on board do not know whether to believe this is some sort of joke or if the old man has simply lost his mind. Seeing their skepticism he raises his right hand, in which he grasps a crude and twisted wooden walking stick and says that “as proof that this prophecy is real I can also tell you that one woman on this bus will also not see the end of her journey,” whereupon a middle-aged woman on the bus dies from a heart attack.

The man he predicts will become a short-term president and the woman who soon succeeds him are–according to the story–supposed to be the opposition presidential candidate Viktor Yushchenko and his chief opposition coalition partner, Julia Timoshenko. The two have been the central figures of the Ukrainian orange revolution that has brought the country to the brink of civil strife. Both are seen on the stage in Kiev’s main Independence Square almost every day addressing the huge crowds of their supporters.

These nationwide protests prevented Ukrainian president Leonid Kuchma from permitting his sitting prime minister, Viktor Yanukovich, to carry out what has been revealed to be a widespread and thuggish plan to steal the November 21 presidential run-off election. From ballot-box stuffing to falsification of the official results being transmitted to the country’s Central Electoral Commission (CEC), Yanukovich’s forces used every possible means to rig the presidential run-off, almost all of which have been subsequently exposed by Ukrainian and foreign media reports.

Bringing supporters into the streets and blockading government buildings has been only the most visible aspect of the orange tide, which has been as well-coordinated and planned as any popular rebellion of the last 20 years. Yushchenko’s orange “Tak!” campaign has been compared to the Solidarity resistance in Poland in the 1980s–this image having been reinforced by a visit to Kiev and an appearance on the stage by the movement’s leader Lech Walesa–Vaclav Havel’s Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia, and the revolt by Russian leaders against the attempted 1991 coup against then Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev.

“Most of these comparisons track with the Ukrainian situation in one way or another, but there is no direct parallel with what is happening here,” said one political observer in Kiev. One chief difference in Ukraine is that Yushchenko and his supporters have not had to fight the forces of the state the way that Solidarity demonstrations were brutally attacked by the ZOMO riot police in Communist Poland. Most of the major Ukrainian political institutions and the state organizations responsible for maintaining the security of the country have joined with or at least supported the demands of the opposition for another election to be held in which neither the process or the results would be tampered with.

Another is that Yushchenko’s supporters have proven that they are in for the long haul. The tent city that was erected on the main street in Kiev the day after the 21 November balloting is becoming a permanent encampment. Barriers of orange tape and streamers have been replaced by wooden fences and graffiti covered walls. An entire subculture of political publications, cartoons, and parodies has been born and shows no signs of abating. Busloads of new volunteers arrive in the city from the far reaches of the country every day. Leaders of the youth movement, Pora, which has been one of the moving forces behind Yushchenko’s campaign, even talk of “exporting the orange revolution further east once they have finished in Ukraine.”

Running this tightly organized and disciplined movement has brought Yushchenko and his supporters have a string of political and legal successes. In the last 10 days both the Ukrainian parliament–and then last Friday the Supreme court of Ukraine–have declared the 21 November election to have been fraudulent and invalidated the results. The court has ordered that a repeat of the runoff be held on December 26, and that criminal investigations be opened to determine who was responsible for planning and carrying out the election rigging. The number of foreign observers from the United States, Europe, and the CIS that will cover this new election will now be doubled in an effort to monitor all 33,000 of the country’s official polling stations.

Finally, Ukraine’s parliament has passed a package of electoral and political reforms, that should eliminate most of the loopholes used to manipulate the balloting process in the previous election. In an unusual gesture, Kuchma himself came to the parliament to sign the bill into law. Parliament also removed the head of the CEC, Sergei Kivalov, who was widely implicated as being in the pocket of the Yanukovich campaign, and two of his deputies. The remaining members of the CEC were forced to appear before the parliament and endure a round of catcalls and then were required to forswear any chicanery in this upcoming Boxing Day election by taking an oath of allegiance to the constitution. Yushchenko, based on all of the available polling data and other assessments seems headed for a victory in a little more than two weeks.

What remains is the question about the old hermit’s prophecy: Is there truth behind the suggestion that should Yushchenko assume the presidency it might not be for long?

A story as strange as the old man tells began on September 10 when Yushchenko was rushed to Vienna’s prestigious Rudolfinerhaus Hospital complaining of severe abdominal pain. Medical tests showed he had an elevated white blood cell count, elevated liver and pancreas enzymes (usually a sign of inflammation in those organs), and that his intestines were pitted with bleeding ulcerations.

Eight days later, before he had fully recovered and before the cause of his illness was identified, he headed back to Ukraine to campaign, but within two weeks he was back in hospital with back pains so acute that it required large doses of morphine to alleviate his suffering. Another week’s worth of testing revealed no definitive answer as to the nature of his affliction, but he once again returned to Ukraine to campaign. The only way that he could still walk at this point was because a tube with a catheter was placed in his back so periodic injections of painkillers could be mainlined directly into his spinal column.

The most dramatic and visible sign of Yushchenko’s mysterious illness is his outward appearance. Comparing “before and after” photos of him one finds it hard to believe he is the same man he was just three months ago. His once almost model-handsome face is today disfigured, discolored, swollen, and covered with large bumps and cysts. His face shows a deathly gray pallor, and his left eye is bloodshot.

Walking close to him on November 23 as he and his supporters trekked up the steep hill from Independence Square to the Ukrainian parliament building, I saw a man who looked exhausted and in pain. It becomes easy to understand why he told the parliament when he returned to Ukraine in September after his hospitalizations to “look at my face. Note my articulation. This is one-hundredth of the problems that I’ve had.”

No one has yet identified what type of poison nearly ended Yushchenko’s life or how he ingested it. Nor has any physical evidence emerged to show when and where he might have been poisoned, although several experts have suggested a dioxin agent could have produced his set of symptoms. What is known is that historically the Russian secret services have been some of the world’s experts at eliminating their opponents by using chemical or radioactive agents.

The Cold War Russian spy laboratories were known for producing specially engineered killing methods that cause death days after the actual act of poisoning and with no ability to trace the murder back to the real killers. A substance such as that which has been used on Yushchenko is in the same league with gas pellets that cause a victim to die in manner that appears to have been a heart attack, lethally-tipped umbrellas and other well-known KGB calling cards.

There is also no evidence to suggest that either Russian intelligence or the Ukrainian KGB successor agency, the SBU, were those responsible for poisoning Yushchenko, but persons in both organizations would have had ample motive for wanting him out of the way. Russian interests would have been happy to see the one man capable of defeating Yanukovich (their choice to rule Ukraine) eliminated and those elements within the SBU closely aligned with Moscow would not be anxious to see the dynamic between the two nations changed. And, these two organizations are the only ones with the expertise and resources to be able to commit such an act.

In the world of international relations the attempted murder of another nation’s presidential candidate is beyond the pale. But, nothing about Moscow’s interference in this election has been rational or restrained, and as Yanukovich’s fortunes have fallen it has bordered on the desperately irrational. Russian money, political consultants and other assistance to Yanukovich in this campaign totals over $300 million. Three days before the first round of Ukraine’s presidential balloting, Russian President Vladimir Putin made a very public appearance at a military parade in Kiev to celebrate the city’s liberation from the Wehrmacht 60 years before, and that was just the start. His attempts to prematurely announce and endorse a Yanukovich win in the presidential election after the second ballot made it clear that he was investing his prestige and reputation in the outcome.

But as the chances for Yanukovich’s prevailing have withered, the Russian president has resorted to more panicked politics of fear and division. Playing the Sudetenland card, Putin declared that the rights of the Russian-speaking eastern regions of Ukraine would be trampled on by the pro-western Yushchenko if he becomes president. Moscow’s mayor Yuri Luzhkov has travelled to the Donetsk region, which is Yanukovich’s birthplace, to promote a possible campaign for the eastern regions of Ukraine to secede from the country if Yushchenko becomes president. The moral of the story appears to be that if you cannot successfully poison the candidate you do not like then try and poison the wells of the electorate against him.

With little more than two weeks to go and no political cards left to play, Yanukovich and his backers in Moscow would seem to have little chance–short of direct military intervention by Russia–to stop a Yushchenko victory. Such a blatant move by Moscow is unlikely but Russian behavior to date shows that short of direct intervention almost anything goes. Even if Yushchenko should become Ukraine’s next president this is no guarantee that Russian intrigues against him will cease and desist.

Perhaps the crazy old man on the bus was not so crazy after all.

Reuben F. Johnson is an American writer living in Kiev.