Viktor Andriiovych Yushchenko (, ; born 23 February 1954) is a Ukrainian politician who was the third president of Ukraine from 23 January 2005 to 25 February 2010. He aimed to orient Ukraine towards the West, European Union, the G7 (then G8), and NATO.
Yushchenko's first career was in the banking industry. In 1993, he became governor of the National Bank of Ukraine, presiding over their response to hyperinflation and the introduction of a national currency. From 1999 to 2001 he was prime minister under President Leonid Kuchma. After his dismissal as prime minister, Yushchenko went into opposition to President Kuchma and founded Our Ukraine Bloc, which at the 2002 parliamentary election became Ukraine's most popular political force.
As an informal leader of the Ukrainian opposition coalition, he was one of the two main candidates in the 2004 Ukrainian presidential election, the other being Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych. During the election campaign in late 2004, Yushchenko became the victim of an assassination attempt when he was poisoned with dioxin. He suffered disfigurement as a result of the poisoning, but survived. The runoff election in November 2004, won by Yanukovych, was marred by widespread accusations of election fraud, leading to the Orange Revolution and an order by the Ukrainian Supreme Court to repeat the vote. Yushchenko won the revote 52% to 44%.
Yushchenko's influence declined soon after he assumed the presidency, especially after falling out with his prime minister and leading political ally Yulia Tymoshenko, as did his and his party's popularity and electoral standing. The rest of his presidency was marked by infighting, legislative deadlock and coalition crises in 2007 and in 2008. He lost re-election to Yanukovych in the 2010 Ukrainian presidential election, finishing in fifth place in the first round with 5.5% of the vote. Yushchenko again led Our Ukraine in the 2012 parliamentary election, but they failed to win representation.
Early life Yushchenko was born on 23 February 1954, in Khoruzhivka, Sumy Oblast, Ukrainian SSR, Soviet Union, into a family of teachers. His father, Andriy Andriyovych Yushchenko (1919–1992) fought in the Second World War, was captured by German forces and imprisoned as a POW in a series of concentration camps in the German Reich, including Auschwitz-Birkenau. His father survived the ordeal, and after returning home taught English at a local school.
Viktor's mother, Varvara Tymofiyivna Yushchenko (1918–2005), taught physics and mathematics at the same school. The Sumy Oblast region where he was born is predominantly Ukrainian-speaking, and this differentiated him in later life from his political counterparts, for whom Russian was the mother tongue.
Yushchenko graduated from the Ternopil Finance and Economics Institute in 1975. He began work as an accountant, as a deputy to the chief accountant in a kolkhoz. From 1975 to 1976, he served as a conscript in the Transcaucasian Military District on the Soviet–Turkish border.
Central banker
In 1976, Yushchenko began a career in banking. In 1983, he became the Deputy Director for Agricultural Credit at the Ukrainian Republican Office of the Soviet Union State Bank. From 1990 to 1993, he worked as vice-chairman and first vice-chairman of the JSC Agroindustrial Bank Ukraina. In 1993, he was appointed Governor of the National Bank of Ukraine (Ukraine's central bank). In 1997, Verkhovna Rada, the parliament of Ukraine, re-appointed him.
As a central banker, Yushchenko played an important part in the creation of Ukraine's national currency, the hryvnia, and the establishment of a modern regulatory system for commercial banking. He also successfully overcame a debilitating wave of hyper-inflation that hit the country—he brought inflation down from more than 10,000 percent to less than 10 percent—and managed to defend the value of the currency following the 1998 Russian financial crisis.
In 1998, he wrote a thesis entitled "The Development of Supply and Demand of Money in Ukraine" and defended it in the Ukrainian Academy of Banking. He thereby earned a doctorate in economics.
Prime minister
In December 1999, Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma unexpectedly nominated Yushchenko to be the prime minister after the parliament failed by one vote to ratify the previous candidate, Valeriy Pustovoytenko.
Ukraine's economy improved during Yushchenko's cabinet service. However, his government, particularly Deputy Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, soon became embroiled in a confrontation with influential leaders of the coal mining and natural gas industries. The conflict resulted in a no-confidence vote by the parliament on 26 April 2001, orchestrated by the Communist Party of Ukraine, who opposed Yushchenko's economic policies, and by centrist groups associated with the country's powerful "oligarchs." The vote passed 263 to 187 and resulted in Yushchenko's removal from office.
"Our Ukraine" leader
In 2002, Yushchenko became the leader of the Our Ukraine (Nasha Ukrayina) political coalition, which received a plurality of seats in the year's parliamentary election. However, the number of seats won was not a majority, and efforts to form a majority coalition with other opposition parties failed. Since then, Yushchenko has remained the leader and public face of the Our Ukraine parliamentary faction.
In 2001, both Yushchenko and Tymoshenko broached at creating a broad opposition bloc against the incumbent President Kuchma in order to win the Ukrainian presidential election 2004.
In late 2002 Yushchenko, Oleksandr Moroz (Socialist Party of Ukraine), Petro Symonenko (Communist Party of Ukraine) and Tymoshenko (Yulia Tymoshenko Bloc) issued a joint statement concerning "the beginning of a state revolution in Ukraine". Though the communists stepped out of the alliance and though Symonenko opposed having one single candidate from the alliance in the 2004 presidential election, the other three parties remained alliesUnderstanding Ukrainian Politics: Power, Politics, and Institutional Design by Paul D'Anieri, M.E. Sharpe, 2006, ; , page 117 until July 2006.Ukraine coalition born in chaos, BBC News (11 July 2006)
On 2 July 2004, Our Ukraine and the Yulia Tymoshenko Bloc established the Force of the people, a coalition which aimed to stop "the destructive process that has, as a result of the incumbent authorities, become a characteristic for Ukraine", at the time Kuchma and Yanukovych were the incumbent authorities in Ukraine. The pact included a promise by Yushchenko to nominate Tymoshenko as prime minister if he won the October 2004 presidential election.Revolution in Orange: The Origins of Ukraine's Democratic Breakthrough by Anders Aslund and Michael A. McFaul, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2006, ;
Yushchenko was widely regarded as the moderate political leader of the anti-Kuchma opposition, since other opposition parties were less influential and had fewer seats in parliament. Since becoming President of Ukraine in 2005, he has been an honorary leader of the Our Ukraine party.
From 2001 to 2004, his rankings in popularity polls were higher than those of Kuchma. In later public opinion polls, though, his support plummeted from a high of 52% following his election in 2004 to below 4%.Socis Poll: "25% Of Ukrainians Prepared To Support Yanukovych For President, 20.5% To Vote For Tymoshenko" , Ukrainian News (17 August 2009)
However, in the parliamentary elections of March 2006, the Our Ukraine party, led by Prime Minister Yuriy Yekhanurov, received less than 14% of the national vote, taking third place behind the Party of Regions and the Yulia Tymoshenko Bloc. In a poll by the Sofia Social Research Centre between 27 July and 7 August 2007 more than 52% of those polled said they distrusted Yushchenko while 48% said they trusted him.
Presidential election of 2004
In 2004, as Kuchma's term came to an end, Yushchenko announced his candidacy for president as an independent. His major rival was Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych. Since his term as prime minister, Yushchenko had slightly modernized his political platform, adding social partnership and other liberal slogans to older ideas of European integration, including Ukraine's joining NATO and fighting corruption. Supporters of Yushchenko were organized in the "Syla Narodu" ("Power to the People") electoral coalition, which he and his political allies led, with the Our Ukraine coalition as the main constituent force.
Yushchenko built his campaign on face-to-face communication with voters, since the government prevented most major TV channels from providing equal coverage to candidates. Requests from Administration of President Kuchma to media. Meanwhile, his rival, Yanukovych, frequently appeared in the news and even accused Yushchenko, whose father was a Red Army soldier imprisoned at Auschwitz, of being "a Nazi," even though Yushchenko actively reached out to the Jewish community in Ukraine and his mother is said to have risked her life by hiding three Jewish girls for one and a half years during the Second World War.The Jewish card in Russian operations against Ukraine , Kyiv Post (30 June 2009)
TCDD poisoning
Yushchenko became seriously ill in early September 2004. He was flown to Vienna's Rudolfinerhaus Clinic for treatment and diagnosed with acute pancreatitis caused either by a serious viral infection or ingestion of chemical substances that are not normally found in food products. Yushchenko claimed that he had been poisoned by government agents.
After Yushchenko's illness, his face showed signs consistent with a diagnosis of chloracne. British toxicologist John Henry declared the lesions on Yushchenko's face were due to chloracne, which may have been caused by dioxin poisoning. Dutch toxicologist Bram Brouwer also stated that Yushchenko‘s facial lesions were characteristic of chloracne, and that he had found dioxin levels in Yushchenko's blood 6,000 times above normal.
On 11 December, Michael Zimpfer of the Rudolfinerhaus Clinic declared that Yushchenko had ingested TCDD dioxin and had 1,000 times the usual concentration in his body. However, Dr Lothar Wicke of the same institute, who was directly involved in Yuschenko's treatment, initially refused to "speculate" on whether Yushchenko was poisoned.Ukrainian Weekly, 3 October 2004. https://archive.ukrweekly.com/wp-content/uploads/The_Ukrainian_Weekly_2004-40.pdf On 11 December 2004, however, Michael Zimpfer stated that testing of Yushchenko's blood had confirmed that he had been poisoned with dioxin.Radio Free Europe, "Yushchenko's Illness Caused By Dioxin Poisoning", 11 December 2004. https://www.rferl.org/a/1056351.htm
Many have linked Yushchenko's poisoning to a dinner with a group of senior Ukrainian officials (including Volodymyr Satsyuk) that took place on 5 September.
Since 2005, Yushchenko has been treated by a team of doctors led by Professor Jean Saurat at the University of Geneva Hospital. Analysis of Yushchenko's body fluids and tissues provided useful information on the human toxicokinetics of TCDD and its metabolites.
Yushchenko himself implicated Davyd Zhvania, the godfather of one of his children, of involvement in his dioxin poisoning.
In August 2009, The Lancet published a scientific paper by Swiss and Ukrainian researchers on the monitoring, form, distribution, and elimination of 2,3,7,8-tetrachlorodibenzodioxin (TCDD) in Yushchenko in relation to his severe poisoning. The 2004 TCDD levels in Yushchenko's blood serum were 50,000 times greater than those in the general population. This new study also concluded that the dioxin "was so pure that it was definitely made in a laboratory".Associated Press: Study: Dioxin that poisoned Yushchenko made in lab