It’s Now Official: Yushchenko Is Ukraine’s Victor

Opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko was officially declared the winner of Ukraine’s bitterly contested presidential election Monday, but supporters of his rival promised to appeal the result to the Supreme Court.

Backers of the president-elect, who were present in the room where the Central Election Commission made its announcement, stood, cheered and waved an orange campaign banner. They briefly chanted Yushchenko’s name until the commission chief told them to be quiet.

“I’d like to congratulate the CEC members on the end of such a difficult election process,” said Yuriy Kliuchkovskiy, a Yushchenko representative to the body.

The final results gave the pro-Western Yushchenko 51.99% of the vote and former Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovich, who was backed by Moscow, 44.2%.

A date for Yushchenko’s inauguration has not been set, but it is expected to be held late this week or next week after final court wrangling.

Meanwhile, outgoing President Leonid D. Kuchma ordered the military to prepare to withdraw Ukraine’s nearly 1,600 troops from Iraq within the next six months, after eight of its soldiers were killed in an explosion Sunday at an ammunition depot south of Baghdad.

Both Yushchenko and Yanukovich called for a troop withdrawal during their campaigns, and Yushchenko indicated on his website Monday that the issue would be a top priority for his government.

Speaking to the election commission, Nestor Shufrych, a representative of Yanukovich, promised to appeal the commission’s decision and declared that debate over the election’s outcome would continue before the Supreme Court.

He argued that the Dec. 26 repeat runoff should not be considered valid.

The high court had invalidated Yanukovich’s narrow victory in the first runoff in November on grounds of fraud, amid massive protests by supporters of Yushchenko.

“After Nov. 21, certain actions took place in Ukraine. These actions were recognized as having revolutionary features by many of our political scientists and experts,” Shufrych told the commission. Such actions “cannot take place during a free and fair election.”

Shufrych insisted that “millions of our compatriots were unable to vote” because of election rules restricting absentee and at-home balloting that were imposed by parliament as an anti-fraud measure after the court overturned the November election result.

The Yanukovich camp’s position that it was impossible to establish the election’s result echoed the successful argument made to the Supreme Court by Yushchenko’s side in November, but the claim then was that authorities had engaged in systematic fraud to inflate the prime minister’s vote tally.

The Ukrainian Supreme Court has made numerous rulings in recent days against more limited appeals by Yanukovich’s camp, and even Shufrych and other backers of the defeated candidate have made it clear they do not seriously expect to be able to overturn Yushchenko’s victory.

What appeared to be happening, instead, was that Yanukovich and his supporters were laying the groundwork to claim in the future that he was the legitimate winner and that the election had been stolen from him.

Kliuchkovskiy, the Yushchenko representative, ridiculed Shufrych’s stance.

“I hope that the Supreme Court will explain to Shufrych what the difference is between a falsified and a democratic election,” Kliuchkovskiy said.

Foreign election observers, including a delegation from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, said after the Dec. 26 runoff that although it was not without technical shortcomings, it had been far more honest and fair than the Nov. 21 balloting.

Sunday’s blast in Iraq, which killed eight Ukrainian troops and one Kazakh soldier, occurred while soldiers were loading aircraft bombs.

The incident was initially reported as an accident, but the acting commander of Ukraine’s land forces, Lt. Gen. Volodymyr Mozharovsky, said investigators were looking into the possibility that it was an attack.

“There are witnesses who saw an automobile from which the peacekeepers were being watched about two kilometers from the place where they were disarming munitions,” Mozharovsky told reporters in Kiev, the Ukrainian capital.

“Shortly before the explosion, the automobile sped away. Later, a live mine was found there,” he said.

Mozharovsky said a radio-controlled device might have been fitted into one of the aerial bombs or artillery ordnance.

Before Sunday, nine Ukrainian soldiers had died in Iraq, according to the Russian news agency Itar-Tass.

Ukrainian acting Defense Minister Oleksandr Kuzmuk said in comments reported by the Russian news agency Interfax that the withdrawal could begin in March.

The deployment of troops to Iraq is highly unpopular in Ukraine.

Kuchma’s government had opposed the U.S.-led war, but it later agreed to send forces in what was viewed as an effort to improve its troubled relations with Washington.