The Toronto Star's Mitch Potter scores an exclusive interview with Ukraine's president Viktor Yushchenko on the eve of his visit to Canada. Yushchenko will be accorded the honour of addressing Canada's House of Commons. I'm going on memory here but I think the only other leaders to address the Commons during Prime Minister Harper's tenure are former Australian Prime Minister John Howard and Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai.
In any event … great piece by Potter and even more compelling for the description of Yuschenko's personal battle to come back from dioxin poisoning:
… he unwittingly ingested a dioxin-laced bowl of soup in the autumn of 2004. Speaking in an exclusive interview on the eve of a long-awaited visit to Canada, the 54-year-old Yushchenko said the physical toll of the treatments all but consumed him during his first 30 months in office.
“I'll tell you one secret – how to make your body pool its energy and strength,” Yushchenko said, calling the period from 2005 to mid-2007 the “biggest overload on my health” because of a punishing schedule of operations. “I can tell you another secret, how these surgeries were made. On Friday nights, right after work, at 9 or 10 p.m., they would do the operations” so Yushchenko would be able to spend weekends marshalling the energy to resume his duties on Monday. Each surgery involved 2 to 2 ½ hours of “cleaning the skin” to remove dioxin.
“The methods are really painful, but I couldn't survive without them,” said Yushchenko, who is believed to be only the third person to survive an infiltration of TCCD dioxin at a level of concentration at least 1,000 times higher than that which occurs naturally in the human body . . .
I saw Yushchenko in 2005 in Brussels. Yushchenko attended a meeting of NATO leaders and had a one-on-one meeting with then-Prime Minister Martin. The Ukraine is desperate to get into NATO.
I assume Prime Minister Harper wants Ukraine in NATO as well, though I've never asked him about it. In Potter's piece, Yuschenko calls Harper “a hero”, hence my assumption.
I hope to be in the Commons tomorrow to listen to President Yushchenko. At NATO, when I first met him, he had just led the “Orange Revolution” and was one of the most interesting people at that 2005 summit. Now, three years later, he is fighting for his political life in Ukraine but his personal fight against the dioxin poisoning is showing tremendous gains. That's the photo that's running with The Star's piece in the top left and that's a photo, on the right, I took from my seat in the front row at a NATO press conference in Brussels three years ago. Incredible.
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