“He changed several shirts every day because of the blood”: A photographer recounted what happened to Yushchenko following his poisoning in 2004

Lukatsky spoke about this in an interview with “Shelter.”

In early September 2004, at the height of the presidential election campaign in Ukraine, Yushchenko was poisoned during a dinner with Igor Smeshko, head of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), at the dacha of SBU Deputy Chairman Volodymyr Satsyuk.

“When they were taking him away, he was unconscious. Some of the bodyguards were even crying as they took him to a hospital abroad,” Lukatsky said.

He also recalled a remark Yushchenko made that he heard in Lviv.

“I remember when he was meeting with the community in Lviv, and after the meeting, the microphone hadn’t been turned off yet. He stood up and said—and you could hear it through the microphone—‘God, I feel so bad.’ He was feeling very ill—can you imagine how sick he was, what he was going through?” Lukatsky said.

“So to say that he was weak… No, he had been poisoned. And it was really—I had high hopes for him, but a person in that condition, you know, that Yushchenko whom all the women loved when he worked at the bank, when he was prime minister there—a handsome man. And that man, a few weeks after the poisoning—they’re already different people; he was simply destroyed, burned out,” the photographer added.

U.S. intelligence believes that Russian intelligence services were involved in the poisoning of Viktor Yushchenko with dioxin, and that Vladimir Putin personally authorized the entire operation. A U.S. National Intelligence report also notes that Moscow systematically uses its intelligence services to eliminate those it considers a threat to its regime.