Classic disinformation

Just over two weeks ago a story emerged supposedly casting doubt on president Yushchenko's 2004 poisoning.

On September 18th 'Segodnya' ran a sensational article entitled: "Prosecutor General of Ukraine Report: Dioxin was sprinkled [into the food] of Yushchenko by Americans", with a sub-heading: Head of Prosecutor General's office revealed poisoning of Yushchenko was falsified"

"Russia Today" picked it up and embellished it in their own article entitled: "Ukrainian president’s poisoning was falsified".

At the story's core is an audio recording whose existence was revealed by Larisa Cherednichenko, head of the department for supervision of investigations into criminal cases of the Ukrainian Prosecutor General's Office.

"RT", in their piece state: "..Cherednichenko mentioned a recording of a phone conversation between two people who called each other Roman and Marta. Speaking in English and occasionally using some Ukrainian words, those two were discussing the delivery of Yushchenko’s blood samples to the U.S. and then to Austria.

She claimed the name “Marta” was a pseudonym and the poisoning was nothing but an operation planned and performed by Ukrainian and foreign special services.

The General Prosecutor’s office representative refused to name who was really hiding behind the “Marta” nickname. However, the gossip that appeared on the Internet shortly afterwards is that it was Kateryna Yushchenko."

Today an 'Ukrainska Pravda' article by Serhiy Leshchenko [who Yushchenko once called a hit-man or killer, following one of his U.P. stories - so 'no friend of the president he'] contains a transcript of the conversation, mainly in English, between "Roman" and "Marta".

It turns out that "Roman" is Roman Zvarych - a US-born former Ukrainian cabinet minister and close friend of Yushchenko, and "Marta" is Marta Lopatynska, his sister-in-law, an opthalmologist from New Jersey. The readers of this blog can read the transcript from the 'U.P.' link and decide for themselves whether there is any evidence of conspiracy in the conversation, or whether it is part of a disinformation campaign to discredit Yushchenko and his allies. Zvarych claims that the conversation is an appeal to his sister-in-law to find toxicology experts in the U.S. who could identify the poisons in Yushchenko's body, and help the-then presidential candidate overcome their effects.

The involvement of U.S. doctors and other specialists helping treat Yushchenko at that time was widely reported, as in the 'Washington Post' article.

Leshchenko reveals at the end of his article that the prime suspect in Yushchenko's poisoning, Volodymyr Satsyuk - then deputy head of Ukraine's security services [SBU], took with him his whole audio file archive when he fled to Russia, where he remains to this day. It was he who gave the "Roman-Marta" recording to the Ukrainian Parliamentary Committee investigating Yushchenko's poisoning. And it was they and Ukrainian Prosecutor General's Office that have deliberately organised this disinformation, colluding with the prime suspect in the case to deliberately 'muddy the waters' and take the heat off Satsyuk.

Just how low can you get?

"disinformation - 1955, from Rus. dezinformatsiya"

"The truth is so precious it must be surrounded by a bodyguard of lies.." Winston Churchill

p.s. On a completely different note, "Andrei Lugovoi, the prime suspect in the murder of Kremlin critic Alexander Litvinenko, has dropped plans to run for mayor in the Russian city of Sochi. Mr Lugovoi said he and his party, the nationalist Liberal Democratic Party of Russia, had decided he should remain an MP in the Russian parliament instead.

British police want to question him about Litvinenko's death by radioactive poisoning in London in November 2006."