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Timoshenko says fraud tainted Ukraine vote

14 February 2010 04:24 (UTC +04:00)

Baku â€“ APA. Prime Minister Yulia V. Tymoshenko, the apparent loser in Ukraineâ€™s presidential election, declared Saturday night that she would not concede, denouncing the results as having been tainted by widespread fraud, APA reports citing â€œThe New York Times.â€

Offering her first public comment on the election, on Feb. 7, Ms. Tymoshenko said she would go to court to overturn the victory of her opponent, Viktor F. Yanukovich, who was reported to have won by 3.5 percentage points.

â€œYanukovich is not our president,â€ Ms. Tymoshenko said in a televised address to the nation. â€œHe will never become the legitimate elected president of Ukraine under any circumstances.â€ Ms. Tymoshenko acknowledged that Ukrainians were weary from years of political instability. She said she would not organize the kind of mass protests that shook the country during the 2004 Orange Revolution, which she helped lead. But she said she was confident that the election would be thrown out.

Still, she faces a significant challenge. European election monitors praised the balloting, saying that it was conducted freely and fairly, and President Obama and other world leaders have called Mr. Yanukovich in recent days to congratulate him.

Mr. Yanukovich, the opposition leader, mounted a comeback in this election after being the loser in the Orange Revolution. He has ties to the Kremlin, and has already indicated that he hopes to improve Ukraineâ€™s relations with Russia. He has said that Ms. Tymoshenko should concede and resign as prime minister for the good of the nation.

Ms. Tymoshenko had stirred speculation that she might do so by remaining largely out of the public eye in recent days. But she is known for her political intensity, and the tone of her remarks on Saturday night suggested that she would not immediately respond to domestic or international pressure to back down.

Preliminary results showed that Mr. Yanukovich won by roughly 900,000 votes. But Ms. Tymoshenko said that more than a million votes had been falsified in his favor. She said that on the Crimean Peninsula, a Yanukovich stronghold, 3 to 8 percent of the votes had been stolen for him.

She said some election monitors from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe would support her in court, though she did not mention which ones. The organization approved of the election.