Disinformation in Ukraine

"The deliberate poisoning of the candidate for the presidential post took place. There was an attempt on his life using dioxin. A medical examination, as well as the questioning of witnesses, has proved this," Medvedko told journalists on Friday in Kyiv, answering a question of a correspondent of the Interfax-Ukraine news agency. 
Oleksandr Medvedko commenting on the president's poisoning in 2004.  I recently posted on several cases of kompromat this past summer in Moldova and Russia.  I missed the poisoning disinformation that came out recently in Ukraine, but EDM (volume 6, Issue 176) has an article on this. 
This conspiracy-disinformation attempt did not gain a significant
following at first, and was apparently shelved, but with new
presidential elections scheduled to take place in Ukraine in
January 2010, the old charges surrounding the poisoning were
resurrected, and new lurid details were added and set in motion. On
September 18 the Ukrainian newspaper Segodnya published a
sensational report stating that Larysa Cherednichenko, the former
head of the department for supervision over investigations into
criminal cases of the Ukrainian prosecutor general's office,
claimed that high-ranking officials from the presidential
secretariat and family members of Yushchenko had falsified evidence
in his poisoning case (www.kyivpost.com, September 19).
The main thrust of the article is that its a wide-spread campaign to smear both Yushchenko and the U.S. prior to the next election. Its interesting that Russia continues to focus their attention on Yushchenko rather than Tymoshenko. Perhaps, its due to the low levels of support for the president, Russia doesn't run a large risk of turning public opinion against it  as happened in 2004.
at Monday, September 28, 2009

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