Yushchenko celebrates as opponent challenges result

Ukraine’s opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko basked in his unassailable lead today as prime minister Viktor Yanukovych refused to admit defeat, with just tens of thousands of ballots left to be counted in the bitterly-fought presidential election.

“I will never recognise such a defeat, because the constitution and human rights were violated in our country,” Yanukovych said last night.

Official results from Sunday’s vote, with ballots counted from 99.89% of precincts, gave Yushchenko 52.01% compared with Yanukovych’s 44.18%. Turnout was 77.2%.

Once the election commission releases the final preliminary results, the candidates have seven days to appeal.

The vote was a rerun of the November 21 run-off, which the Supreme Court annulled after allegations of widespread fraud. Yanukovych had been named the winner of the earlier vote.

Yanukovych said his campaign team had nearly 5,000 complaints about how the voting was conducted.

He criticised politicians who approved election law reforms restricting home voting, and blamed the ruling for leading to the reported deaths of eight elderly voters who went to the polls despite ill health – and despite the Constitutional Court’s decision on the eve of the vote to throw out the restrictions.

He said he would demand that the election results be cancelled, but said he had not asked his supporters to organise protests.

“We will act in accordance with the laws of Ukraine. We will go down a legal path,” Yanukovych said.

Tension during the fiercely-fought election campaign was fuelled by the fraud allegations and Yushchenko’s claims to have been poisoned by authorities in an assassination attempt. Doctors confirmed he was poisoned by a nearly lethal amount of dioxin, which severely disfigured his face.

Yushchenko will need monthly blood tests to track how quickly the poison is leaving his body.

Experts say it is likely to dissipate quickly in the first few months but then slow down. Doctors have said they expect a gradual recovery, although they fear an increased long-term risk of a heart attack, cancer or other chronic diseases.

If he is confirmed as president, Yushchenko will take the helm of a nation wracked by corruption and at odds with its largest trade partner, Russia. The political team he must rely on is a cobbled-together coalition with vastly different ideas about how much power the presidency should have.

One of Yushchenko’s most stalwart allies, Yulia Tymoshenko, has said she wants the post of prime minister – but many Ukrainians, especially in pro-Yanukovych strongholds in the east and south of the country, dislike the radical lawmaker who has pushed a Ukrainian nationalist agenda.

The bitter campaign deepened the rift between Ukraine’s Russian-speaking, heavily industrialised east that backs Yanukovych, and cosmopolitan Kiev and the west, from where Yushchenko draws his support and where Ukrainian nationalism runs deep.

Yushchenko has said he will aim to end the hostility between eastern and western Ukraine within two years.

The opposition leader, a former Central Bank chief, has pledged to bring this nation of 48 million closer to the West by earning it a bigger role in international bodies such as the European Union.

He said that under his leadership, Ukraine could aim at an associate membership in the EU in three to five years.

Russia, too, must be taken into account. Moscow, which clearly supported Yanukovych in the campaign and is nervous about the eastward-expanding EU and NATO, remains a giant investor in Ukrainian business, and Ukraine is a key consumer of Russian goods.

Yushchenko promised his first foreign trip as president would be to Moscow.

Meanwhile, an official whom the opposition had accused of helping engineer the fraud, transport minister Heorhiy Kirpa, was found dead yesterday with a gunshot wound, said railways spokesman Eduard Zanyuk.

The opposition had claimed that Kirpa authorised allocation of special trains to ferry Yanukovych supporters from precinct to precinct to vote multiple times. It was unclear whether the death was related to the election.