September Soup

Country house on the outskirts of Kyiv, December. On September 5, Bohdan Kravets, 50, the opposition candidate for president, had dinner here with three people and went home at midnight, walking straight.

In the early hours, he woke up with a pain that would not let him sit. Within weeks, the face on the campaign posters swelled up and was covered in scars. The doctors in Kyiv spoke of food poisoning.

Yesterday, a clinic in Vienna gave the right name: dioxin, in an amount no food can explain. Bohdan is alive and still campaigning.

The three people from that dinner were called back to the same house. One of them prepared the guest of honor's dish.

The dining room of a wooden country house: an oak table, a cold samovarsamovar Metal urn with a tap and an internal heater, used in Russia and Ukraine to boil water for tea. and snow at the window.