From the chronicle of distortions #3: Yushchenko is as bad as the guys he's up against

On Oct 28, 2004, the Guardian ran a commentary by Johnathan Steele titled: "Where the Cold War Never Died". It included a nasty little swipe at Yushchenko for being undemocratic.

Steele said: "[Political observers] also wonder how much of a democrat Yushchenko is. He publicly compared supporters of one murdered journalist, Georgy Gongadze, to fascists." The original context of this remark we aren't given, and I am unfamiliar with it, but the intention is clearly not in promoting the truth, as Steele leaves out the following very vital details:

1) Ukrainians clearly do not find, and have not ever found, Yushchenko to be anti-Gongadze. To take a recent bit of proof, during the pro-Yushchenko rallies this week, Gongadze's mother appeared on the stage herself, and Gongadze's wife addressed the crowd in a videotaped message from her home in Washington. Would they be promoting him in front of millions if there were any credible argument that Yushchenko was reviling Gongadze's name, or the names of his true supporters?

2) Gongadze didn't just get killed in a random attack. He was under surveillance by the Ukrainian secret police, who let him be kidnapped by thugs, who then tortured him, killed him, and left his beheaded body lying in a ditch out in the backwoods of the Kyiv region for a passerby to find. Later a tape was released by Kuchma's bodyguard, in which he caught Kuchma saying "something should be done about that guy" just before Gongadze was killed. That Yushchenko made a comment Steele could use out of context was fit to print, that the actual *murder of the journalist in question* was linked on tape to the administration was not fit to even mention.

In the same article, Steele points out the visits by senior US officials to Ukraine as interference, claiming "They were aroused, it seems, by the outgoing president Leonid Kuchma's sudden change of line on Nato," and continuing on about how the US is just trying to get Ukraine into its NATO club because it hates Russia. What he neglects to mention is that two of the three people he mentioned (Richard Holbrooke and Henry Kissenger) were explicitly invited by the current President's son-in-law, Victor Pinchuk, and came based on his invitation.

Either Mr. Steele has been incredibly sloppy with his journalism and compounded his sloppiness with unsubstantiated accusations, or he is purposefully concealing facts. Either way, he is not a journalist you should trust when reading about Ukraine.