Ukrainian opposition leader Victor Yanukovych onFeb. 8pressed rival Yulia Tymoshenko to concede defeat after his slender victory in a presidential election that could tilt the ex-Soviet state back towards Moscow.
With just over 97 percent of votes counted, official election figures gave Yanukovych a margin of 2.41 percentage points over Prime Minister Tymoshenko.
But a Central Election Commission official told Reuters that Yanukovych remained the winner of Sunday’s vote.
With a complete picture still to come in from voting in his strongholds in the south and east, the gap with Tymoshenko was expected to increase rather than shrink further, Commission member Mykhailo Okhendovskiy said.
Analysts said the slender gap might encourage Tymoshenko, who earlier warned Yanukovych against celebrating victory prematurely, to press for advantage or contest the result.
"The situation is developing in favour of going to the courts and some sort of deal," said Viktor Nebozhenko of the Ukrainian Barometre centre. "It is not really clear who has won. The forces are more or less equal."
"If it is 3 percentage points or less it is contestable. The temptation will be there for her to make a challenge," said Andrew Wilson, a senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations.
But, as the fiery Tymoshenko remained uncharacteristically quiet, putting back a scheduled news conference by several hours, her rival pressed her to acknowledge the fight was over and not mount a challenge.
"Yulia Tymoshenko has repeatedly said that even an advantage of 10 votes is already a victory. We hope that an advantage of nearly one million votes will be an argument convincing enough for her to recognise our victory," said Yanukovych aide Anna German.
The Yanukovych camp said that a parallel count which it had conducted and which was now complete gave the opposition leader 48.96 percent over Tymoshenko’s 45.41 percent.
Tymoshenko’s camp, alleging fraud, had also offered a parallel count that saw her edging out her rival.
EUPHORIA TO DISILLUSION
The official results signalled a comeback for the rough-hewn Yanukovych, 59, tagged as Moscow’s stooge five years ago when street protests led by Tymoshenko overturned results that initially gave him victory in an election tainted by fraud.
A Yanukovych victory could see the country of 46 million people shift back towards former Soviet master Russia after five years of infighting and a sliding economy turned the euphoria of the 2004 Orange Revolution into disillusionment.
Both candidates pledged integration with Europe while improving ties with Moscow, but Tymoshenko is seen as more pro-Western. Yanukovych is unlikely to pursue membership of NATO, an ‘Orange’ goal that infuriated neighbouring Russia.
Yanukovych, a beefy ex-mechanic who was mauled by the sharp-tongued Tymoshenko during a bitter campaign, urged his 49-year-old rival on Sunday night to resign as prime minister.
An aide, Borys Kolesnikov, answering reporters’ question on Monday, said there were no back-stage contacts with Tymoshenko’s camp to do a deal on a future alliance.
"It is impossible. There can be no coalition with BYuT (the Tymoshenko bloc in parliament)," said Kolesnikov.
If the voting pattern is unchanged, Yanukovych would be the first president since independence in 1991 to receive less than 50 percent of the vote, although elections in the 1990s were not always judged free and fair.
Tymoshenko was the co-architect of the 2004 revolution with pro-Western President Viktor Yushchenko, but their relationship quickly soured.
The fiery former gas tycoon late on Sunday urged her team to "fight for every result, every document, every vote", though she backed away from a threat to call people out on to the streets in a repeat of the 2004 protests.
She was scheduled to hold a news conference in the middle of Monday. But she put it back until after international monitors, headed by the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe, had handed down their verdict on the election.
A protracted dispute over the result would further delay Ukraine’s chances of repaying more than $100 billion of foreign debt and nursing its sickly economy back to health after a 15 percent collapse last year.
In Russia, the source of the gas which flows through Ukraine’s pipeline network to the West, the election was closely watched but state-controlled media avoided taking sides.
Ukraine’s $120 billion economy has been battered by a decline in the value of vital steel and chemicals exports that has hammered the hryvnia currency, slashed budget revenues and undermined the domestic banking system.
Regardless of the outcome, political squabbling was set to continue, reflecting the country’s broader divisions. Ukraine is divided almost equally between a Russian-leaning east and south and a Western-friendly centre and west.
