Ukraine president presses early election, warns against violence

Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko demanded Tuesday in a face-to-face confrontation that the prime minister accept early parliamentary elections and warned against violent street protests -- noting pointedly that as president he commands the military.

Backers of Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovich in turn asked the Constitutional Court to overturn a presidential decree signed Monday that disbanded parliament and called elections for May 27.

The day’s developments suggested that an ongoing power struggle between the pro-Western president and pro-Russian prime minister would be played out, at least for now, primarily through the legal system rather than on the streets.

The two men were bitter rivals in 2004 when massive street protests forced a repetition of a presidential runoff that Yanukovich claimed to have won. He lost the subsequent balloting but became prime minister last August when he put together a coalition of parties to form a parliamentary majority.

At his meeting with the prime minister Tuesday, the president warned that he would not tolerate any violent means of preventing fresh elections. “As the commander in chief of the Ukrainian armed forces, I will not allow a forcible scenario,” Yushchenko declared, according to his press service.

He also criticized his rival for action Monday by the prime minister’s supporters in parliament aimed at putting the Central Election Commission under the control of fraud-tainted former members.

“Reinstating the previous composition of the Central Election Commission, which a court found complicit in rigging the 2004 election, is not only illegal but immoral,” the president said, according to the Russian news agency Interfax.

The president’s administration issued its own appeal to the court, asking it to overturn parliament’s action on the Central Election Commission.

The president’s decision to dissolve parliament “came as a surprise to Yanukovich and his entourage. They thought Yushchenko was bluffing and were expecting him to cool down and back off,” Oleksander Dergachyov, director of the Institute for Political and Ethnic Studies, said in a telephone interview from Kiev, the Ukrainian capital.

“Yushchenko went ahead and did what he promised, and now both sides agreed to take the matter to the Constitutional Court,” Dergachyov added.

“The most important thing is that both sides don’t want to resort to violence, and they made it clear today that no force will be used.”

The competing political camps were already making campaign-style statements against each other Tuesday.

Finance Minister Mykola Azarov, a supporter of the prime minister, said new elections would cost too much.

He went on to take a dig at Yulia Tymoshenko, an ally of the president who is the leader of an opposition party named after herself.

“If someone has lots of money, and there are a lot of millionaires in the Yulia Tymoshenko Bloc, they might perhaps chip in and finance the elections,” he said, according to Interfax.

Tymoshenko hit back by suggesting that the country would be far better off spending money on elections and unseating the prime minister, implying that he stood at the head of a corrupt set of power-holders who were enriching themselves, the Russian news agency RIA Novosti reported.

The balloting would cost only $60 million, she said, whereas “if the mafia is allowed to continue ruling the country, Ukraine will lose tens of billions of dollars, because Ukraine is being robbed today.”

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david.holley@latimes.com

Times staff writer Sergei L. Loiko contributed to this report.