This article is more than 1 year old

This article is more than 1 year old

Ukraine’s presidential candidates have both submitted to drug tests as the country’s elections increasingly resemble a political circus in the final weeks of the campaign.

Shadowed by hundreds of journalists, the incumbent, Petro Poroshenko, and the frontrunner, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, both gave blood samples in Kyiv clinics on Friday.

The televised tests follow a bizarre demand by the challenger for both men to prove before a planned debate that they were not drug addicts or alcoholics.

Poroshenko, who trails the newcomer Zelenskiy, was eager to face his opponent in a televised face-off, which he felt could convince voters to give him a second term. So when Zelenskiy’s team released a slickly produced video on Thursday challenging the president to a debate at the country’s Olympic Stadium, the incumbent agreed to all conditions, including the drug test.

The competing shows of bravado have led to critics calling it a “pissing contest”, a label made even more apt by Poroshenko’s submission of a urine and hair follicle sample on Friday.

“I am here and you [Zelenskiy] are not,” Poroshenko said. “I am sure that he is mustering up the courage to come here and that the debates will take place as that is what is required under Ukraine’s laws.”

Zelenskiy, a successful media producer and comedian who also plays the president on his own television show, has given few interviews before the 21 April runoff vote.

He has promised to announce his team and key policies before then, and has called on Poroshenko to fight corruption by reforming the courts, and police and intelligence services.

Poroshenko, in videos released by his campaign, has attacked Zelenskiy for his lack of experience. “Being a president and commander in chief is not a game,” he said on Thursday. “But if you want a stadium, let it be in a stadium.”