UKRAINE:For a nation struggling to escape a murky past, there could not be a starker depiction of the price of failure: a head of state forever scarred by a bizarre and unsolved crime.
Ukrainian president Viktor Yushchenko's face is still pockmarked and pitted from the effects of dioxin poisoning that nearly killed him in September 2004, during a pre-election battle with rival Viktor Yanukovich that is now being repeated before this Sunday's ballot.
Then, the prize was the presidency. Yanukovich claimed victory before huge street protests and court rulings overturned the fraudulent result, paving the way for a re-run that swept Yushchenko to power.
Almost three years after the so-called Orange Revolution, Yanukovich is now a prime minister whose party is poised to win the parliamentary election, while Yushchenko is an embattled president whose party is likely to trail home in third place.
Many things in Ukraine are still the same, however: Yushchenko and his Orange Revolution ally Yulia Tymoshenko still accuse Yanukovich of being in thrall to Moscow and the "oligarchs" who run largely Russian- speaking, industrial eastern Ukraine; and the fog of mystery and speculation that shrouds the president's poisoning has hardly thinned.
"I know who actually poisoned me," Yushchenko said earlier this month, "but there is no doubt that other people are behind them." Yushchenko refused to name the culprits, but did identify the suspected source of the poison, the whereabouts of his likely assailants and the country that is blocking the probe: on all three counts - Russia.
"The investigators know when, what meal [ was poisoned], where, who. There is information on three key people who are in Russia," he said, adding that he had spoken about the matter to Russian president Vladimir Putin last December.
"Since then, unfortunately, there has been no response. I am convinced that after these people are questioned the facts will be proved."
Yushchenko also lambasted Russia for refusing to hand over a sample of the dioxin produced in its laboratories to compare it with the kind that poisoned him.
Last week, Russia's prosecutor general finally agreed to send a sample to Kiev, but not before Moscow's ambassador to Ukraine had queried the timing of Yushchenko's allegations - just before the elections and in the wake of alleged Kremlin involvement in the poisoning in London of former Russian agent Alexander Litvinenko.
"Where did these accusations come from all of a sudden?," asked Russian envoy Viktor Chernomyrdin. "Why didn't they ask, make requests? I just don't understand."
But the apparent attack on Yushchenko is not Ukraine's only open wound.
It was fury against the regime of Yushchenko's predecessor, Leonid Kuchma, which fuelled the Orange Revolution that defeated his anointed successor, Yanukovich.
Much of that fury stemmed from the murder of investigative journalist Heorhiy Gongadze, whose decapitated body was found in woods outside Kiev in 2000.
The killing triggered months of protests against Kuchma after his former bodyguard released tape recordings in which a voice resembling Kuchma's ordered that Gongadze be "dealt with".
Three former police officers face trial over the killing, but the people who organised it remain unknown, despite Yushchenko's insistence that the probe would be a priority.
Ukrainian business is dominated, like Russia, by a small coterie of tycoons who made enormous wealth through the quick-fire and often dubious privatisations of the 1990s.
Many Ukrainians and foreign investors hoped President Yushchenko would clean up the economy - until he signed off on a long-term deal to buy gas for Ukraine from a mysterious new firm that critics accuse of having links to a notorious Mafia boss.
"The major danger to Ukraine comes not from abroad, from Russia or Nato or global terror. It comes from inside, from the intersection of big politics, big business and organised crime," said Hryhoriy Nemyria, a chief aide to Tymoshenko, an anti-corruption campaigner whose years in the shadowy energy sector earned her a fortune and the moniker of "gas princess".