Tuesday, November 2, 2004. Page 1.

Ukrainian Candidates One Point Apart

By Nabi Abdullaev and Francesca Mereu
Staff Writer

KIEV -- Less than one percentage point separated Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych and opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko in preliminary results Monday, sending Ukraine's presidential election into a runoff that looked set to be decided by who picks up the left-wing vote. With 94.24 percent of the vote counted as of Monday afternoon, the Central Elections Commission gave Yanukovych, who has the backing of outgoing President Leonid Kuchma and the Kremlin, 40.12 percent and Yushchenko 39.15 percent, Interfax reported. The commission said the remaining votes would not bring a victory of more than 50 percent of the vote to either of the candidates in the first round and set the date for a runoff for Nov. 21.

Western observers said the election failed to meet "a considerable number" of standards for free and fair elections. A delegation of official CIS observers, however, disagreed.

In the bitterly fought election campaign, voters have been asked to consider whether Ukraine should forge closer links with Europe, and eventually look to join the European Union and NATO, or build stronger ties with Russia.

Neither Yanukovych or Yushchenko claimed outright victory in the first round of voting Sunday, though Yushchenko's campaign said it would submit more than 70 complaints on voting violations to the Central Elections Commission, a staffer at Yushchenko's headquarters, Nikolai Katerinchuk, told reporters Monday.

"We do not agree with the first results of the election. We believe there was fraud,"said Anatoly Grytsenko, a campaign organizer for Yushchenko. "We might go to court, we might ask parliament to intervene or we might organize mass protests. But I believe the best way is to win the second round -- and we can do it." The joint mission of foreign observers from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, or PACE, and NATO said Monday that the elections "did not meet a considerable number of OSCE, Council of Europe and other European standards for democratic elections." In an interview with Ukraine's independent Channel 5 television, Hanne Severinsen of PACE called the election campaign the "most dirty" she had witnessed.

OSCE chief observer Bruce George said the election was a step backward compared with Ukraine's parliamentary elections in 2002. Observers from Washington-based nonprofit group the International Republican Institute voiced similar conclusions Monday.

But Western observers' criticisms referred mostly to the campaign, which was marked by state media bias in favor of Yanukovych, and the state's obstruction of opposition activities. Sunday's vote came in for less direct criticism.

APOSCE chief observer Bruce George "The voting process is evaluated as positive as a whole,"OSCE ambassador to Ukraine Geert Ahrens told journalists. "In general, voting was held in accordance with the law." Campaign staffs of both major candidates held their own exit polls, with each giving their candidate the lead. But while Yanukovych's campaign claimed a lead of less than three percentage points, Yushchenko's people claimed a lead of 13 percentage points, Interfax reported.

The official tally evoked a much stronger reaction from Yushchenko.

"I am sure that the most criminal techniques are being used now to rig the vote where authorities planned to apply them," Interfax quoted Yushchenko as saying Monday as votes were being counted across the country. But he called Sunday's vote "a victory of the democratic forces in Ukraine." A rally on Monday in Lviv in western Ukraine, a region where support for Yushchenko is believed to be strong, drew between 8,000 and 10,000 of his supporters, who accused the authorities of election fraud, Ukrainian media reported.

Igor Popov, the head of the Committee of Voters of Ukraine, a public elections watchdog, accused the Central Elections Commission of counting ballots too slowly. The commission's actions suggested fraud, he was quoted by online newspaper Ukrainskaya Pravda as saying.

Yanukovych told a news conference Monday that the vote results were an expression of the public's trust in the authorities.

His campaign representative on the Central Elections Commission, Stepan Gavrish, dismissed the criticism by foreign observers as "emotional" and "sarcastic.""I am absolutely convinced that there was no single case of the prime minister misusing any advantages of his office," he said, Interfax reported.

In contrast to their Western counterparts, observers from former Soviet countries regarded the elections as free, legitimate and conducted in accordance with the law, a statement by the CIS observers' mission said Monday.

"The registered flaws and neglect of duty by several electoral commissions in the run-up to the elections and during the vote, as well as by representatives of several registered candidates for the post of president during the election campaign, had no considerable influence on the free expression of voters' will," said CIS executive secretary Vladimir Rushailo, announcing the mission's findings.

Although the combined vote on Sunday for Communist Pyotr Simonenko and Socialist Aleksander Moroz was only 11 percent, how their supporters vote in the runoff will become critical. Both the Yushchenko and Yanukovych campaigns said Monday that they would seek to join forces with the Communists and Socialists.

Gennady Zyuganov, leader of Russia's Communists, predicted that leftist voters in Ukraine would throw their votes behind Yanukovych, who has received high -profile backing from President Vladimir Putin in the campaign.

"Only together can Russian and Ukraine get out of the maelstrom we have been pushed into," he told Interfax on Monday.

But the Ukrainian Communist Party was infuriated by how the authorities handled the election.

"All the claims by official representatives about the democracy and transparency of Ukraine's elections are a mean deception," the party said in a strongly worded statement. The statement described several occasions when Communist observers at polling stations were intimidated by the authorities when they attempted to protest violations they said were carried out by election officials.

The remaining ballots were split among 20 other candidates, with only one of them, Natalya Vitrenko, getting more than 1 percent. Two percent of voters cast their ballots "against all." The official turnout was about 75 percent, six percentage points higher than in the 2002 parliamentary elections. Most observers said the higher turnout was a sign of growing interest in politics and civil society in the country.

More than 63,000 Ukrainians voted outside the country, the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry told Interfax on Monday. After two-thirds of these votes were counted, Yushchenko led among this group with almost 53 percent, while Yanukovych had less than 38 percent, Interfax reported.

Nabi Abdullaev reported from Moscow.