Yushchenko seeks new election in Ukraine
MOSCOW – Ukraine’s defiant opposition leader, Viktor Yushchenko, insisted Friday that a new presidential election must be held soon to rectify Sunday’s disputed balloting, which has left Europe’s second biggest country on the brink of anarchy.
Yushchenko met face to face Friday with his presidential rival, Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych, in the capital of Kiev, but rejected Yanukovych’s proposal to let the courts settle any election irregularities. The government declared Yanukovych the winner Monday, but official U.S. and European observers said the election was deeply flawed by widespread fraud. U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell termed the result “unacceptable.”
Yushchenko told tens of thousands of his supporters Friday night in Kiev’s Independence Square that he would hold talks only on staging a new election.
The Ukrainian Supreme Court is withholding official certification of the vote until it can rule on the fraud charges.
Javier Solana, the European Union’s foreign minister, was among top officials who met with the presidential rivals late into the night Friday, and afterward he said a new election was a “possibility.”
Meanwhile, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov issued a sharp rebuke to the United States and Western Europe, saying European leaders had rejected the election of the pro-Russia Yanukovych only because they wanted Ukraine to align with the European Union and the United States.
“Some European capitals say they don’t accept the elections, and their next thesis is that Ukraine must be with the West,” Lavrov said. “The Ukrainian people must decide who Ukraine wants to be with, and such statements (from Western countries) make you think that somebody really wants to draw new dividing lines in Europe.”
Outgoing Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma joined Solana in meeting with the two presidential candidates to try to resolve the crisis. The talks also included Russian envoy Boris Gryzlov and Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski.
A working group for further talks was set up, Kuchma said, adding that both men vowed that demonstrations by their followers would remain peaceful. Yushchenko reportedly was smiling broadly after the meeting, and Yanukovych was not.
The British Broadcasting Corp. reported that a state-run TV channel, UT1, announced live on an evening newscast that its news team was going to join the protests in the square. A UT1 correspondent said their message to the protesters was: “We are not lying anymore.”
The station’s sign-language presenter said she had junked the approved, pro-government script during an earlier newscast and told viewers instead about the charges of vote-rigging.
Government buildings were blocked and barricaded Friday – the prime minister’s own spokesman couldn’t get into his office – and squads of blue-coated police cadets marched and chanted in favor of the challenger. At one point, a full-dress military chorus took the stage to serenade the huge pro-Yushchenko crowd in Independence Square.
“The international community is watching very carefully,” President Bush said earlier Friday outside his ranch in Crawford, Texas. “People are paying very close attention to this and, hopefully, it will be resolved in a way that brings credit and confidence to the Ukrainian government.”
Powell said Wednesday that the Bush administration didn’t want to get into “a contest with Russia over this.” But there was no mistaking the tone of his remarks, nor the hard line that several European diplomats took at an EU-Russia summit meeting the next day.
Meanwhile, tens of thousands of Ukrainians continued peacefully protesting in Kiev, where the emotional momentum has swung solidly toward Yushchenko. Smaller numbers of government supporters began arriving in the capital from eastern Ukraine and camped in the main railway station.
Earlier in the day, in a televised address, Kuchma told protesters to “calm your passion” and put an end to “this so-called revolution.”