Premier Rejects Results of Ukraine Vote

Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovich refused to concede defeat Monday even as opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko built an insurmountable lead in a presidential election that independent observers said was more legitimate than the first attempt last month.

With 99.9% of the vote counted, the pro-Western Yushchenko had 52%, with 44% for Yanukovich, who received Moscow’s backing.

Charging that Sunday’s revote was marred by even more severe problems than those that led the Supreme Court to invalidate the Nov. 21 balloting, Yanukovich said he would ask the court to overturn the latest results.

“I will never accept such a defeat,” Yanukovich said at a news conference. “We will be fighting for the results to be invalidated.... Our observers have filed 4,971 complaints so far.”

There were signs, however, that Yanukovich was primarily aiming to position himself and his allies as a potent opposition under a Yushchenko presidency and that he might not truly expect to nullify his rival’s victory.

Taras Chornovil, campaign manager for Yanukovich, told reporters Monday that the election results might lead to the emergence of a “good and effective opposition” in Ukraine.

“The election was nontransparent, undemocratic and dishonest,” Chornovil said, according to the Russian news agency Itar-Tass. “This, in Chornovil’s view, gives more chances to a new opposition at parliamentary elections in 2006,” the agency reported.

Early in the campaign, Yanukovich was seen by critics as little more than a frontman for outgoing President Leonid D. Kuchma and a few powerful businessmen from eastern Ukraine. But after the Supreme Court demanded a repeat runoff, Yanukovich broke with the unpopular incumbent and ran a forceful campaign based on fierce criticism of Kuchma as well as Yushchenko.

That may have boosted his long-term prospects as an opposition leader who would be seen as standing up for the interests of his supporters.

“Yanukovich is about 8% behind. This defeat is not humiliating. Yanukovich’s political reputation and prospects remain intact. He may feel free to run in the parliamentary elections,” Volodymyr Fesenko, chairman of the Penta political research center, said at a news conference, the Interfax-Ukraine news agency reported.

“Yanukovich lost the presidential elections as a presidential candidate, not as a politician,” Global Strategies Institute Director Vadim Karasyov said at the same event.

Meanwhile, Transportation Minister Hryhoriy Kirpa, who was also one of Ukraine’s most prominent businessmen, was found dead from a gunshot wound at his home outside Kiev, the capital, authorities said. Initial reports indicated that the death was being viewed as a probable suicide.

Kirpa, 58, had close ties with Viktor Medvedchuk, the powerful chief of staff to Kuchma. Kirpa also was one of Kuchma’s most influential associates.

Yushchenko supporters had accused Kirpa of helping provide rail passage to large groups of Yanukovich supporters during the two previous rounds of voting: the 24-candidate contest on Oct. 31 and the Nov. 21 runoff that was thrown out because of systematic fraud. The opposition had accused Yanukovich backers of abusing absentee voting rules by traveling to multiple polling stations to repeatedly cast ballots.

An anti-fraud electoral law approved by parliament this month sharply restricted the use of absentee ballots and limited eligibility to vote at home to the severely disabled.

Although the Constitutional Court ordered the easing of those restrictions to allow at-home voting by anyone too ill or disabled to get to their polling place, Yanukovich said that eight people died Sunday from health problems as a result of their efforts to get to polling stations.

“The constitution and human rights were violated in our country, and people died because of this,” Yanukovich said. “Who is going to take responsibility for the death of these people?”

Nestor Shufrych, a Yanukovich representative on the Central Election Commission, told journalists that the appeal to the Supreme Court and possible protests by Yanukovich supporters “will be total deja vu for the CEC and the whole society.”

Yushchenko’s chief of staff, Oleg Rybachuk, ridiculed that claim. “I would call it Yanukovich’s secondhand approach,” he said. “This is not deja vu. This is irritating everybody. It has the opposite effect. If they say it’s deja vu, there should be proof that Yushchenko’s headquarters, in cooperation with Kuchma, has been falsifying the election systematically.”

Bruce George, head of an observer mission from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, said at a news conference Monday that the handling of the revote “was more transparent and fairer” than earlier rounds.

“The people of this great country made a great step forward to free and fair elections,” he said. “That is not to say the election was perfect. It wasn’t.”

Yanukovich, however, blasted foreign observers’ overall endorsement of the procedures. “I think observers should always use facts,” he said. “If they do not have the facts, they are not observers. Only the blind, as they say, could fail to see how many violations there were.”