THE GOOD GUY'S ANSWER TO PALPATINE:

The Poisoning of Ukraine's President (Lionel Beehner, 2/8/06, Seed Magazine)

Under the radar, in early December, tests came back from three undisclosed labs in Belgium, Britain and Germany, confirming what many scientists already suspected: In September, 2004, Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko had been poisoned. His blood samples did indeed contain an abnormally high level of dioxin, 1,000 times the accepted level. One year later, Yushchenko's face—with its strong jaw and movie-star features, perfect politician material—remains badly pockmarked. [...]

"We knew right away he was poisoned because his skin symptom was very symptomatic of this kind of dioxin," said Mykola Prodanchuk, one of Ukraine's top toxicologists and the director of the Kiev-based Institute of Eco-Hygiene and Toxicology. [...]

The early suspect: Russian intelligence. After all, it is no secret that Yushchenko, a pro-Western reformer, was not the Kremlin's preferred candidate in 2004. Moreover, Russia's KGB has a long history of failed assassination attempts of political figures, stretching as far back as the time of Rasputin, Tsarina Alexsandra's mystic who was nearly poisoned in 1916 by pastries laced with cyanide.

During the 69 years of Soviet rule, the KGB took poison assassination plots to a new level of sophistication. In 1957, for instance, a Soviet agent assassinated Ukrainian émigré leader Lev Rebet in Munich using a cyanide gas pistol. In 1978, a Bulgarian agent at a London bus stop used an umbrella loaded with ricin pellets to inject a Soviet defector with poison. But dioxin poisoning is un-chartered territory, even for Russian spooks.

If this poisoning was an attempt on Yushchenko's life, why did the assailant not use a stronger substance like strychnine? After all, dioxin is not commonly used as a tool for assassination and the substance can be detected in the blood for years after initial contact.

"Dioxin poisoning is not a good way to [kill someone]," said Hryhorczuk. "No human we know of has died from acute dioxin poisoning." [...]

Investigators remain baffled by the case. Scientists are still studying Yushchenko's symptoms in a search for answers. Meanwhile, Ukraine's president seems to have accepted his fate—and disfigured face—as the price for trying to reform his country's rough-edged politics, a system yet to shed its Soviet past.