The first attack was not with missiles or Kalashnikov bullets, but with dioxin droplets. It was put in Viktor Yushchenko’s cup by SBU agents, Ukrainian heir to the KGB, during a dinner with high officials to which he had the terrible idea to accept the invitation. Shortly thereafter she began to feel brutal pains in her back as her face became disfigured.
He was the candidate of the pro-European coalition that, according to the polls, was going to defeat Viktor Yanukovych, the candidate of the pro-Russian Party of Regions, at the polls.
To the popularity that his successes gave him as head of the Central Bank of Ukraine, added to have the appearance of a Hollywood actor. To most women, Viktor Yushchenko seemed like a very attractive man, with the face of a soap opera heartthrob. It was precisely there that he targeted the first Russian attack against the pro-European leadership.
The high degree of synthesis required to produce these dioxin levels it could only be produced in Russia, according to Prosecutor General Alexsandr Medvedko. That was what the droplets that the pro-Russian government had put in the glass of the anti-Russian candidate that night in September 2004 had.
Still with his face disfigured and gripped by pain, Yushchenko beat Yanukovych at the polls. But the pro-Russian nomenclature tried one last trap perpetrating a fraud so visible and gross that it sparked the “Orange Revolution”. That wave of protests managed to annul the election ruined by fraude, and a new vote will be ordered.
Yushchenko won in 2004, but during his presidency the pro-European coalition broke down due to friction between the president and Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, allowing the pro-Russians to return to power in the next election, only to lose it again.
The fact is that Yushchenko’s deformed face is proof of Kremlin interference in the governments of Ukraine, a country whose society is like the effigy of Janus, the deity of Roman mythology with two opposing faces looking in exactly opposite directions.
One of the faces of the Ukrainian Janus look towards russia and the other looks towards the European Union. The force that makes the first to the East and the second to the West has spent years cracking the map at the height of Donbass.
For the Kremlin, the first blow was struck by the pro-Europeans when, violating the spirit of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) that they proclaimed in 1991 when dissolving the USSR, the governments of the three Slavic states (Russia, Ukraine and Belarus) began to seek entry into the European Union.
One of the clauses to integrate the EU is also join NATO. The Spanish socialists had always been anti-NATO but, when they came to government after signing the Moncloa Pact and accepting Spain’s entry into what was then the European Economic Community, were the ones who incorporated the country into the Atlantic alliance.
The pro-European Ukrainians have fewer ideological problems than those that the PSOE of Felipe González and Alfonso Guerra had to enter the NATObecause they always saw Russia as a colonizing empire of their surroundings and as a threat to the independence and freedom of Ukraine.
For Russian nationalism, which is Slav, the Slav countries must align themselves with Russia. That is why he considered the Ukrainian turn towards the European Union as the first aggression.
For him ukrainian nationalism, Kiev must not submit to the “dictat” of Moscow. That is why he considered it an unacceptable interference when the Kremlin forced the Ukrainian government, in 2013, to suspend the signing of the Association Agreement and the Free Trade Agreement with Brussels, causing the “Euromaidan” to explode, an immense wave of protests against interference of Moscow and the genuflection before the Kremlin of the governments of the Party of Regions.
That protest was brutally repressed with a balance that reached a hundred dead, but brought down the pro-russian government led by Viktor Yanukovych. The fall of that government detonated the separatist rebellion in Donbass, which had the assistance of Moscow in the provision of weapons. Within the framework of this quagmire, Russia occupied and annexed the Crimean Peninsula.
When the Ukrainian army tried to put down the separatist rebellion that proclaimed secession in Donetsk and Lugansk, it encountered such strong, professional and well-armed resistance that the assistance and training provided by the Russian army was evident. Furthermore, the shooting down of a Malaysian airlines plane flying from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur was carried out when it was flying over Donestk with a Buc missile, a Russian piece of anti-aircraft artillery whose sophisticated launch battery can only have been provided by the russian army and operated by Russian military or militiamen trained by Russian military.
The catastrophe of flight MH17 and its almost two hundred deaths is another tragic proof that Vladimir Putin had initiated the hostility in military terms before the massive mobilization of forces to surround Ukraine.
Seen from Russian nationalism, the provocations were initiated by pro-European Ukrainians by pressing for the country to join the EU. Brussels is also seen as responsible for the tensions between Russia and NATO by inviting Kiev, in 2008, to join the Atlantic alliance.
However, the face of Ukrainian Janus looking to the west feels that Moscow’s control over Ukraine was maintained after the Soviet dissolution, through the Party of Regions governments. Those pro-Russian governments were corrupt, authoritarian and committed political crimes like the murder of the journalist Gueorguiy Gongadze, in the year 2000, for investigating and revealing scandalous cases of corruption.
After the murder of the journalist, recordings of conversations between Leonid Kuchma and other high-ranking members of the pro-Russian government appeared, raising the need to silence Gueorguiy Gongazde. Shortly after, former Interior Minister Yuri Kravchenko, who was about to testify about the journalist’s murder, was found dead. The official version was that Kravchenko committed suicide, but it is difficult to commit suicide with two shots to the head.
The events are many, but when it comes to pointing out one as the first attack in these decades of tensions that led to the brink of war, the poisoning that disfigured Viktor Yushchenko appears.
Before the missiles and bullets that it is preparing to launch on its neighbor, what the Kremlin launched were droplets of dioxin on the glass of champagne that the leader of the Orange Revolution would drink minutes later.
