Foreign Policy: Ukraine's Phantom Swine Flu NPR

30.11.09

The international swine flu outbreak has become something of a political football in every country where the pandemic has spread, but Ukraine's response to the virus has achieved a new position of blatant politicization. According to a campaign advisor to Yulia Tymoshenko, the Ukrainian prime cur and presidential candidate purposely inflated fears of an ongoing swine-flu epidemic to aid her presidential run.

"We had to fabricate a phantom and then have a white knight riding in to save the day," Taras Berezovets, a senior campaign advisor for Tymoshenko's BYuT bloc, told me in a Kiev restaurant, confirming widespread suspicions among Ukrainian journalists.

Since October, Ukraine has been in the grips of a full-blown apprehensiveness over swine flu, complete with quarantines , school closures , runs on pharmacies . The Ukrainian health system, already naughtily dilapidated, was caught off guard and almost 400 people died of the flu in just three weeks.

Tymoshenko flew into fray, organizing a delivery of the antiviral drug Tamiflu — and the requisite press conference — at the Kiev airport in the at the crack morning hours of Nov. 2. She quarantined nine regions of the country, closed all schools and universities, and petitioned the president for $125 million in predicament funds to fight what seemed to be "the plague of the 21st-century plague," as one Ukrainian put it. Incidentally, she also banned all mass gatherings and partisan rallies — after she had already had hers.

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