Ukraine's Phantom Flu

How Yulia Tymoshenko created a swine flu panic to get herself elected president.

BY JULIA IOFFE | NOVEMBER 25, 2009

The global 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 level of blatant politicization. According to a campaign advisor to Yulia Tymoshenko, the Ukrainian prime minister and presidential candidate purposely inflated fears of an ongoing swine-flu epidemic to aid her presidential run.

"We had to create 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 panic over swine flu, complete with quarantines, school closures, runs on pharmacies. The Ukrainian health system, already badly dilapidated, was caught off guard and almost 400 people died of the flu in just three weeks.

Tymoshenko flew into action, organizing a delivery of the antiviral drug Tamiflu -- and the requisite press conference -- at the Kiev airport in the early morning hours of Nov. 2. She quarantined nine regions of the country, closed all schools and univeristies, and petitioned the president for $125 million in emergency 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 political rallies -- after she had already had hers.

Although the World Health Organization concluded that "the numbers of severe cases do not appear to be excessive when compared to the experience of other countries," the call for calm was drowned out by Tymoshenko's drumbeat of action. Pharmacies ran out of surgical masks and medicines as panicked Ukrainians dangerously hoarded supplies.

The fracas couldn't have come at a better time for Tymoshenko, the self-styled heroine of the 2004 Orange Revolution, who was losing the race to the very man the revolution disgraced: Viktor Yanukovich, the Russian-backed candidate. Tymoshenko's second term has been marred by vicious backbiting with her onetime Orange Revolution ally, President Victor Yushchenko, her perceived pandering to Russia on gas deals, and her apparent inability to save Ukraine from the absolute implosion of its economy.

ALEXANDER PROKOPENKO/AFP/Getty Images

 SUBJECTS:
 

Julia Ioffe is a freelance journalist living in Moscow.

BEREZ

9:59 PM ET

November 26, 2009

Misquoted

I met with Julia Ioffe this week. We had a long conversation about the election program of Yulia Tymoshenko, especially that concerned her foreign policy and economic benchmarks.
We also discussed of course the California influenza epidemic H1N1, which seriously affected Ukraine, but this was only a small episode of our conversation. I remember my answers to the questions. My answers to her questions relating to the influenza (in response to Ioffe’s question whether the scope of the epidemic is exaggerated) I pointed to media reports that were emotional about a so-called “phantom” which had provoked unnecessary panic among Ukrainian citizens.

When Ioffe asked politicians who can best emerge from this situation, I replied that because the government worked effectively (as the World Health Organization has confirmed), we adopted a strategy towards the media to show that the "phantom" is an exaggeration (using my hands to show quotation marks). The purpose of this was to show that the "white knight" (referring to Prime Minister Tymoshenko) had won that PR battle. It is a fact that the government had won the information war directed against it. The prime ministers political opponents unsuccessfully sought to use the panicked reaction of the media towards the influenza to create the impression that no epidemic actually exists and that it had somehow been made up by Tymoshenko.
The authoritative international WHO believes that Ukraine should prepare for a second wave of Californian influenza.
I am a former graduate of British higher education, the Royal College of Defence Studies and King's College London, and I know the British and Western media quite well. The author misquoted me to suit a particular slant that she wanted to find for her article, and in the process sensationalizing a difficult issue. I believe that Foreign Policy readers deserve better informed and objective articles.

 

WORLD PROCESS

9:44 PM ET

December 14, 2009

was this journalism? Op Ed? or a diary entry?

I am surprised to see FP publish a story that is so weak and predictable. And then sensationalizes
the story. Even without Mr. Berezovets rebuttal the story is slanted.

"This sentence should have been at the beginning:
Some observers -- including the WHO -- point out that, spin job or not, Tymoshenko's energetic response did help put Ukraine's failing health system in some order ahead of an oncoming second wave of swine flu."

And this at best should be found in a "Dear Editor" letter:
"But for Tymoshenko's people, the one true benefit is clear"

 

BEREZ

10:00 PM ET

November 26, 2009

Misquoted

I met with Julia Ioffe this week. We had a long conversation about the election program of Yulia Tymoshenko, especially that concerned her foreign policy and economic benchmarks.
We also discussed of course the California influenza epidemic H1N1, which seriously affected Ukraine, but this was only a small episode of our conversation. I remember my answers to the questions. My answers to her questions relating to the influenza (in response to Ioffe’s question whether the scope of the epidemic is exaggerated) I pointed to media reports that were emotional about a so-called “phantom” which had provoked unnecessary panic among Ukrainian citizens.

When Ioffe asked politicians who can best emerge from this situation, I replied that because the government worked effectively (as the World Health Organization has confirmed), we adopted a strategy towards the media to show that the "phantom" is an exaggeration (using my hands to show quotation marks). The purpose of this was to show that the "white knight" (referring to Prime Minister Tymoshenko) had won that PR battle. It is a fact that the government had won the information war directed against it. The prime ministers political opponents unsuccessfully sought to use the panicked reaction of the media towards the influenza to create the impression that no epidemic actually exists and that it had somehow been made up by Tymoshenko.
The authoritative international WHO believes that Ukraine should prepare for a second wave of Californian influenza.
I am a former graduate of British higher education, the Royal College of Defence Studies and King's College London, and I know the British and Western media quite well. The author misquoted me to suit a particular slant that she wanted to find for her article, and in the process sensationalizing a difficult issue. I believe that Foreign Policy readers deserve better informed and objective articles.
Taras Berezovets

 

TELO

9:28 PM ET

December 14, 2009

The story is incomplete

The story is incomplete without mentioning the current Ukrainian president's take on the issue. Wasn't it Viktor Yushchenko who suggested the idea of canceling the elections as they are stipulated in the constitution? - because of the flue, of course.

 

ISTIKBAL

4:40 AM ET

December 24, 2009

evden eve nakliyat - evden

evden eve nakliyat -
evden eve nakliyat -
evden eve nakliyat -
reklam
- evden eve nakliyat