Chaos Reigns in Ukraine Presidential Race

ALEKSANDAR VASOVIC
Associated Press

KIEV, Ukraine - The apparent front-runner was out of action for weeks with a mysterious illness. His close rival was hospitalized after an attack and was then warned he could be assassinated. With Ukraine's presidential election three weeks away, democracy seems to have gone badly awry as chaos and suspicion overshadow campaign issues in this strategically important country that sways between the West and Russia.

For more than a decade, Ukraine's 47 million people have endured some of the ex-Soviet Union's most frenzied politics. But the past weeks have been extraordinary, even by Ukrainian standards.

Lame-duck President Leonid Kuchma recently complained the campaign had turned into a "theater of the absurd," and he in turn was accused of orchestrating the disarray in a Byzantine strategy to cling to power.

Tensions escalated Sept. 6 when Viktor Yushchenko, the pro-Western opposition politician seen by most polls as the narrow favorite, disappeared. Four days later he was rushed to an Austrian clinic for treatment of what his allies claimed was a poisoning attempt.

Yushchenko, haggard and with his face partially paralyzed, resumed campaigning in mid-September but returned to the clinic for more treatment. He returned to Ukraine on Sunday and was met by cheering crowds.

Yushchenko's detractors sneered that he'd just been laid low by cognac and bad sushi, and a parliamentary investigation said it found no evidence of foul play.

But that finding was denounced by some members of the commission itself, and Yushchenko's campaign chief alleged Thursday that doctors suspected a "biological weapon" was used. The clinic declined to comment.

Yushchenko's main opponent in a field of 24 candidates, Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych, also has suffered from politics Ukrainian-style.

He was hospitalized last month after being hit during a campaign appearance with what police said was a heavy metal object but which the opposition said was just an egg. Yanukovych fell on his back and officials said he was in shock.

Last week, opposition lawmaker Yuriy Karmazin claimed Kuchma's allies and "another country" were plotting to assassinate Yanukovych as an excuse for declaring an emergency and postponing the election.

The other country was not named but the implied culprit was Russia, Ukraine's giant eastern neighbor, which alternately provokes and curries favor with the country.

Texas-sized Ukraine matters greatly to the Kremlin. It abuts the expanded NATO alliance, and its Black Sea ports are a Russian gateway to the Mediterranean. It has a huge ethnic Russian population, and while its western half tends to see its future in Europe, the eastern half leans more toward Russia.

Russia became a campaign issue last month after its prosecutors demanded the extradition of Yulia Tymoshenko, a key Yushchenko ally, over her alleged involvement in a mid-1990s corruption scandal. Tymoshenko claims the accusations are part of a Kremlin smear tactic.

The web of mysteries and allegations also includes reported plots by anti-Semitic ultranationalists to endorse Yushchenko in hopes of turning liberals away from him.

Opposition and human rights organizations complain of frequent police harassment, detention and beating of campaign activists, confiscation of electoral material, regional officials preventing electoral meetings, and crackdowns on independent media.

All this appears to have seriously undermined faith in the political process and could breed distrust of the next president, no matter who he is.

Polls by the Democratic Initiatives Foundation, a think tank based in the capital, Kiev, show 74 percent of Ukrainians believe the vote will be unfair. The United States, the European Union and international and domestic human rights groups all have warned of possible fraud in the Oct. 31 balloting.

Parliament speaker Volodymyr Lytvyn sees method to the chaos, suspecting "a plot to undermine the vote" and enable Kuchma to stay in office and seek a third term. Kuchma, 66, insists he will not run again, but this year he won a controversial court decision allowing him to seek a third term.

"A couple of incidents more - and it'll be easy to declare the vote a failure," at which point Kuchma could stay on because "as any responsible leader, he could not leave the nation destabilized," said Oleksandr Lytvynenko, an analyst at the Kiev-based Razumkov think tank.