ANALYSIS: Details emerge of second Russian attempt to assassinate Yushchenko (01/16/05)

ANALYSIS

Details emerge of second Russian attempt to assassinate Yushchenko

by Taras Kuzio
Eurasia Daily Monitor

On the eve of Viktor Yushchenko's inauguration as Ukraine's third president Ukraine's relations with Russia will undoubtedly emerge as one of the most difficult issues. The Economist (December 29, 2004) advised Mr. Yushchenko that, "he needs to kiss and make up with Russia and Vladimir Putin, who backed Mr. Yanukovych and has thus been humiliated by his defeat."

This though, will be far easier said than done. Russia is reportedly behind two assassination attempts on Mr. Yushchenko's life, one through poisoning and a second with a bomb. Mr. Yushchenko alluded to the bomb threat when he said, "Those who wanted to blow myself up did not undertake it because they came too close and could have blown themselves up" (Ukrainska Pravda, December 16, 2004).

While details of the poisoning are more well known, evidence of the bomb threat has only just come to light in a documentary on Channel 5, a television station sympathetic to Mr. Yushchenko. Details of the bomb attempt were aired in the weekly "Zakryta Zona" (Closed Zone) documentary (www.5tv.com.ua/pr_archiv/136/0/265) suitably entitled "Terrorists".

The title of the documentary is ironic in the light of attempts by the authorities in both the 1999 and the 2004 elections to portray the opposition as "terrorists." Serhii Ivanchenko, a Socialist Party (SPU) activist wrongly imprisoned in 1999 for an "assassination attempt" on Progressive Socialist leader Natalia Vitrenko awaits his release (Ukrainska Pravda, December 22, 2004). Mr. Ivanchenko was a patsy in an attempt to blacken SPU leader Oleksander Moroz whom Leonid Kuchma was afraid of facing in Round 2 of the 1999 elections.

During last year's election campaign a still unexplained bomb in Kyiv that killed one person and injured dozens more was blamed on the Ukrainian National Party (UNP), a member of Mr. Yushchenko's Our Ukraine bloc. Explosives were also planted during searches of the offices of opposition youth groups. The Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) and Internal Affairs Ministry have now admitted that charges of terrorism against the UNP and youth groups were false (Ukrainska Pravda, December 16, razom.org.ua, December 23, 2004).

As Channel 5 has now documented, the real terrorists were the authorities acting in cahoots with the Russian Security Service (FSB). It would be naive to believe that President Vladimir Putin was unaware of what was taking place. An illicitly transcribed telephone conversation, cited at length in the "Zakryta Zona" documentary, between a Ukrainian informant and an FSB officer showed how the Russian authorities were fully aware of the dirty tricks being used by Russian political technologists working for Ukrainian Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych.

Russian political technologists, such as Gleb Pavlovsky and Marat Gelman, worked with Mr. Yanukovych's "shadow (real) campaign headquarters" headed by Deputy Prime Minister Andrii Kluyev. Messrs. Pavlovsky's and Gelman's Ukrainian contact was Viktor Medvedchuk, presidential administration head and Social Democratic United Party (SDPU) leader.

As this illicitly taped conversation reveals, assassinations and similar dirty tricks are understood by Messrs. Gelman and Pavlovsky as normal components of their range of "technologies" that they use in Russian elections and in elections in other CIS countries. The FSB officer in Moscow discusses the poisoning of Mr. Yushchenko and the role of these political technologists in such technologies.

The bomb attempt may have been conceived after the poisoning failed to kill Mr. Yushchenko prior to the first round of the election. The unearthing of the planned bomb attack came about only after a burglar alarm went off and a spetsnaz unit of the Internal Affairs Ministry (State Defense Service [DSO]) was sent to investigate. The alarm went off near one of the three offices used by the Yushchenko campaign.

The DSO noticed a car with Russian number plates close by and asked the two occupants for their documents. After checking their Russian and Ukrainian passports, the DSO found them to be false. A search of the car's trunk found 3 kilos of plastic explosives - enough to destroy everything within a 500-meter space.

After the arrest of both of the car's passengers, an investigation revealed that they were both Russian citizens: Mikhail M. Shugay and Marat B. Moskvitin, both from the Moscow region. Their only contact in Moscow had been a certain "Surguchov" who had hired them in September for the bombing operation on Yushchenko and his ally, Yulia Tymoshenko. The terrorists were to obtain $50,000 after the bomb plot was undertaken.

After smuggling the explosives through the Russian-Ukrainian border, both FSB operatives set up a base of operations in the village of Dudarkiv, 15 kilometers from Kyiv. A search of these premises found pistols, a radio station and details on how to make bombs.

The plot thickened when additional illicitly made telephone conversations were played in the "Zakryta Zona" documentary. The conversations were made by the SBU during the elections and handed over to Mr. Yushchenko after Round 2.

Mr. Kluyev is heard discussing with unknown individuals the whereabouts of Mr. Yushchenko's office and the location where the leadership of the Yushchenko camp meets. The producers of "Zakryta Zona" believe that Mr. Kluyev was seeking this intelligence to pass on to the Russian bomb assassination team so that any planted bomb would murder not only Mr. Yushchenko, but other members of his team, such as Ms. Tymoshenko.

Mr. Yushchenko has described his poisoning as, "a project of political murder prepared by the authorities" (AP, December 17, 2004). In December the Vienna clinic that treated Mr. Yushchenko concluded that he had, in fact, been poisoned by TCDD, the most toxic form of dioxin. His dioxin level was 6,000 times higher than normal and the second highest recorded in history. TCDD was a key ingredient of Agent Orange.

Alexander V. Litvinenko, who served in the KGB and the FSB before defecting to the United Kingdom, has revealed that the FSB has a secret laboratory in Moscow that specializes in the study of poisons. A former dissident scientist now living in the U.S., Vil S. Mirzayanov, stated that this institute studied dioxins while developing defoliants for the military. SBU defector Valerii Kravchenko also pointed to this FSB laboratory as the likely source of the dioxin that poisoned Mr. Yushchenko (The New York Times, December 15, 2004).

Ms. Tymoshenko and Mr. Yushchenko also have pointed to a Russian connection in the poisoning (Ukrainska Pravda, December 24, 2004 and January 4). In a discussion on Novyi Kanal TV (December 21, 2004), former SBU Chairman Yevhen Marchuk ruled out the possibility that the dioxin originated from inside Ukraine.

Mr. Yushchenko has alleged that the poisoning took place during a September 5, 2004, dinner at the home of SBU Deputy Chairman Volodymyr Satsiuk, a member of the SDPU. This again reveals the involvement of Mr. Medvedchuk and Russian political technologists working with Mr. Yanukovych's shadow campaign headquarters headed by Mr. Kluyev. Not surprisingly, Messrs. Satsiuk and Kluyev have hurriedly abandoned their government positions to return to Parliament, where they enjoy immunity.

Russia's involvement in two terrorist attacks in Ukraine, a poisoning and bombing' make a mockery of President Putin's commitment since 9/11 to work alongside the United States in the international campaign against terrorism.

Taras Kuzio is visiting professor at the Elliot School of International Affairs, George Washington University. The article above, which originally appeared in The Jamestown Foundation's Eurasia Daily Monitor, is reprinted here with permission from the foundation (www.jamestown.org).

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