Losing PM rejects Ukraine result

KIEV - Viktor Yushchenko swept to election victory in Ukraine yesterday, while his bitter rival, the Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych, refused to accept the outcome of the presidential rerun and vowed to challenge the result.

With less than 1 per cent of the vote left to count, Mr Yushchenko had an impregnable 52 to 44 per cent advantage. His supporters feted their president-in-waiting after a poll battle that has shattered the rigid politics of the regime which has been in place since Ukraine gained independence from Russia in 1990.

The reverse for Mr Yanukovych came after weeks of mass demonstrations in protest at election fraud last month.

The "Orange Revolution" saw hundreds of thousands of people blockading the centre of the capital, Kiev, and other cities and eventually forcing a rerun of the presidential election. The moral muscle from the demonstrations allowed the opposition to change election procedures to diminish the scope for fraud. They were helped by an army of 12,000 international election monitors.

The Yanukovych camp said there had been "massive falsification" by their rival and they would challenge the results in the supreme court, which could delay an official result until the new year.

But international monitors said they were satisfied with the election's conduct. The OSCE monitoring mission chief, Bruce George, said: "The people of this great country made a great step forwards to free and fair elections by electing the next president of Ukraine."

The President of Georgia, Mikhail Saakashvili, was the first foreign leader to congratulate Mr Yushchenko on the win, followed by the Polish President, Aleksander Kwasniewski, who said: "All Europe nervously watched the Ukrainian elections and today Europe feels great joy from the fact that democratic processes have won in Ukraine."

In the early hours of this morning, when three exit polls showed he had a lead over his rival, Mr Yushchenko went to Independence Square, in the heart of the capital, to address his supporters.

It was in this square that hundreds of thousands of his supporters first gathered on the evening of 21 November to protest against the voting fraud perpetrated by the government in that day's election, triggering the 17 days of protests that became the "Orange Revolution".

Mr Yushchenko, who claims to have been scarred from a near-fatal poisoning attempt last September by his political enemies, was flanked by his wife and senior political allies as he bowed to his supporters.

Ukraine became independent in 1990 but has since been ruled by former communist-era politicians who are believed to be allied to the shady businessmen with criminal links known as "oligarchs".

Mr Yushchenko said their time was over. He said: "This is a victory for the Ukrainian people, for the Ukrainian nation. Perhaps we have been moving towards this for several centuries. For the past 14 years we were independent, but now we have become free."

Mr Yushchenko wants Ukraine to join Nato, the European Union and the World Trade Organisation. He has said that he will cooperate with Moscow as an equal but the era where Ukraine was treated as subordinate by its former colonial master is over.

- THE INDEPENDENT