Poisoning back and forth

In the press here, there had been some back and forth on the posoning issue. At first the clinic in Austria had confirmed poisoning, then it hadn't and people there had supposedly been threatened by Yuschenko supporters to make the claim. Later if was again , then it wasn't back around until the definitive report came out last week.

This explains at least a part of why this happened:

The extent of an apparent plot to poison Viktor Yushchenko, Ukraine'sopposition leader, and then cover up the evidence now reaches across Europe. Yushchenko, who said he was poisoned with dioxin at a dinner with Ukraine's secret police, was found to have ingested 6,000 times the level of dioxin healthy people have, the Financial Times reported Friday.

Soon after Yushchenko first claimed he had been poisoned, President Leonid Kuchma's son-in-law [Viktor Pinchuk] engaged a French public relations team to initiate a media campaign, centered on a Vienna clinic, calculated to disparage the poisoning accusations, the newspaper said.

Yffic Nouvellon of EuroRSCG and his public relations team arranged a press conference where Lothar Wicke, general manager of Vienna's Rudolfinerhaus Clinic, contradicted Yushchenko's poisoning allegations. Nouvellon also contacted international media offering "evidence" Yushchenko had not been poisoned. When asked during the media campaign, Nouvellon denied any connections to Kuchma's family. The clinic's president has since cut its ties to Nouvellon and EuroRSCG.

(Action Ukraine Report #262)