Presidential rivals have televised drug tests
THE two remaining candidates in Ukraine’s presidential race had televised drug and alcohol tests yesterday, capping a week in which they traded jibes in tit-for-tat social media videos and goaded each other to agree to a live policy debate.
President Petro Poroshenko is facing Volodymyr Zelenskiy, a comedian with no political experience who plays a fictional president in a TV series, in a run-off on April 21 after neither obtained a majority of votes in the first round last Sunday.
Zelenskiy won nearly twice as many votes as Poroshenko, but the incumbent is fighting back by painting his rival as a lightweight who would put Ukraine’s security at risk.
The comedian had demanded they both be tested for drugs after he accepted Poroshenko’s challenge for a policy debate in an apparent attempt to up the ante in their rivalry.
Yesterday, Zelenskiy, 41, was shown in a livestream on his Facebook page having a blood test at a private laboratory.
“I took a blood test. They pumped all sorts of blood out of me. But thank God, I have enough of it. Young blood,” he told reporters afterwards.
An hour later, several television channels broadcast footage of Poroshenko, 53, having his blood drawn by a medic in red scrubs in a room inside Kiev’s main football stadium.
Poroshenko submitted blood, hair and urine samples to four different laboratories, said Volodymyr Yary, the chief doctor at a Kiev state hospital.
He announced that the preliminary results from Poroshenko’s test showed that “no psychoactive substance was found”. | ANA