KIEV — Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko accused her main rival, Viktor Yanukovych, on Wednesday of preparing to carry out “monstrous” fraud to win a weekend presidential election.
Tymoshenko said an unusually high number of voters in Yanukovych’s home region of Donetsk had opted to vote from home, showing the organizing hand of his Party of Regions.
Home voting was widely used in the 2004 presidential election to skew election results because it allowed officials to bypass the secret ballot and did not require voters to prove their identity.
Tymoshenko said eight members of the 14-member Central Electoral Committee were also in the pay of the Yanukovych camp.
“Such monstrous falsification didn’t even happen in 2004,” Tymoshenko told a government meeting.
She said she intended to take her complaints to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, which has sent election monitors to Ukraine.
Yanukovych, on a campaign trip to Simferopol, shrugged off Tymoshenko’s accusations.
“Tymoshenko’s comments … show that a guilty mind betrays itself,” he told journalists. “How can the opposition falsify results? Only the authorities have that ability — they have the mechanism, structure, the Interior Ministry.”
President Viktor Yushchenko, meanwhile, made a dramatic appeal Tuesday for the electorate to have faith in his “European policies” and said victory for either Tymoshenko or Yanukovych “will return us to the swamp for decades.” He renewed a charge that Tymoshenko and Yanukovych were part of a single Kremlin coalition of forces.