Two Years Before Litvinenko's Murder, Another Kremlin Enemy Was Mysteriously Poisoned
In 2004, Viktor Yuschenko was Ukraine’s most promising candidate to oust Leonid Kuchma, an unpopular president who served for a decade and enjoyed close ties with Russia. Yuschenko won the election later that year, but at a steep cost: he’d been poisoned with a near-fatal amount of dioxin, which left him disfigured and seriously ill. In the aftermath, Ukraine’s highest prosecutor investigated whether the apparent attempt on Yuschenko’s life was the work of the Kremlin, but in the decade since, the poisoning has never been solved.