Give up, you've lost, election rival told

Pressure is mounting on Ukrainian election loser Viktor Yanukovych to concede defeat today, after it emerged that opposition candidate Viktor Yushchenko won the bitter presidential race by more than two million votes.

Defiant Kremlin favourite Yanukovych faced calls to concede and abandon his vow to challenge the rerun election.

Yushchenko won 51.99% to Yanukovych’s 44.19% in the court-ordered rerun of the vote, according to a final preliminary vote tally released yesterday – a difference of about 2.3 million votes.

“In principle, we have the result,” said Yaroslav Davydovych, the head of the Central Election Commission. “I don’t know who can doubt it.”

Yanukovych, who returned to work yesterday as prime minister, has refused to concede defeat and said he will challenge the results of Sunday’s rerun in Ukraine’s Supreme Court.

He said his campaign team had nearly 5,000 complaints about how the voting was conducted and claimed that 4.8 million people – more than double the margin of Yushchenko’s victory – had been unable to cast ballots, among them disabled and elderly voters.

Ukraine’s parliament approved restrictions on voting at home in a bid to prevent fraud, but the Constitutional Court threw out the restrictions on the eve of the vote. Many people, however, were unaware of the ruling, Yanukovych’s campaign said.

Yanukovych’s vow to challenge the results echoes Yushchenko’s successful move following the fraud-tainted November 21 run-off, which the court annulled, leading to Sunday’s revote. But that ruling came amid widespread complaints from foreign monitors that the November 21 vote was unfair; this time, monitors have said they did not see mass violations.

Yanukovych’s team has yet to file an appeal and the Central Election Commission’s Davydovych said that many of the complaints received, purportedly from individual voters, were “printed on the same computer, with the same text, the same envelopes”.

“This is on the conscience of those who do that,” Davydovych said.

President Leonid Kuchma, in the run-up to Sunday’s vote, urged both candidates to accept the official result and not appeal. The Council of Europe, the continent’s top human rights watchdog, also called on Yanukovych on Tuesday to accept defeat.

“I call on all parties to accept the verdict of the ballot box and to refrain from rhetoric which may fuel division in Ukraine,” said Terry Davis, the council’s secretary general.

Ukraine’s east-west divide has deepened during the bitter and protracted election campaign. The Russian-speaking, heavily industrialised east backed Yanukovych, while cosmopolitan Kiev and the nationalistic west supported Yushchenko.

The bitterly-fought campaign also frayed ties between the west and Russia. The Kremlin is nervous about the eastward expanding EU and Nato, and Russian president Vladimir Putin personally campaigned for Yanukovych in the first two rounds of voting in November. He also congratulated Yanukovych after the fraud-marred second round, ignoring western complaints that the vote was rigged.