Disillusioned Ukrainian voters gave pro-Russian opposition leader Viktor Yanukovych a first-place finish in the initial round of presidential voting Sunday, setting up a showdown with Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, exit polls showed.

“Today marks the end of Orange power,” Yanukovych said in televised remarks. “There will be no room for [President Viktor Yushchenko] in the second round. He has officially lost the faith of the people.”

The National Exit Poll Consortium said Yanukovych had scored 31.5 percent against 27.2 percent for Tymoshenko. A second exit poll, conducted for Ukraine’s ICTV television, gave Yanukovych 35.1 percent and Tymoshenko 25.7 percent.

If confirmed, the result was a stronger performance for Tymoshenko than earlier polls had suggested, implying that Yanukovych faces a tough fight in the Feb. 7 second round.

Yushchenko, who was elected in the 2004 Orange Revolution with 52 percent of the vote, had support from 6 percent of voters, according to the National Exit Poll Consortium. Its poll had a margin of error of 2.5 percentage points.

But reports of voting irregularities poured in from across the country, and the Interior Ministry said it had received some 1,200 complaints detailing falsified voter registrations and illegal absentee voting. All of the leading candidates accused one another Sunday of trying to rig the election, in which analysts have predicted up to 10 percent of the ballots could be fraudulent.

After the release of the exit polls, a close ally of Tymoshenko predicted that the prime minister would win the second round. “The main conclusion is that despite the small victory of our opponent in the first round, our next president will be Yulia Tymoshenko,” Deputy Prime Minister Oleksander Turchynov said.

But an ally of Yanukovych said the opposition leader had a “100 percent” chance of victory. “The chances for victory for our candidate Viktor Yanukovych in the second round are 100 percent. For them, for Tymoshenko, there are no chances at all,” Mykola Azarov, a former finance minister, told reporters.

Yanukovych has pledged to end Ukraine’s efforts to join NATO and to elevate Russian to the status of a second official language after Ukrainian.

If he wins, relations with Western-allied Georgia are likely to worsen. Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili has thrown his support behind Tymoshenko and has sent hundreds of election observers to eastern Ukraine, Yanukovych’s electoral base.

Donetsk officials on Sunday accused Georgia of sending in hundreds of men disguised as election observers at Tymoshenko’s request “to disrupt the polls and … stage provocations.”

But Levan Tarkhnishvili, who heads Georgia’s observers, told journalists that policemen were pushing the monitors from polling stations in Donetsk. He said his countrymen had seen cases of banned multiple voting in Donetsk.

While Yushchenko has sought to build bridges with the West and to reduce Russia’s influence in Ukraine, his promises of European integration and economic growth have gone unfulfilled. Many voters blame him for failing to fend off the global financial crisis, which has hit Ukraine harder than almost any other country in Europe.

“I have no doubt that Ukraine will again demonstrate that it is a European, democratic country with a free nation, free people and free choice,” a grim Yushchenko said after voting alongside his wife and children in Kiev.

A wild card in Sunday’s vote was former central bank chief Sergei Tigipko, who a VTsIOM poll said last week was creeping up on Tymoshenko. “I voted for democracy, for market reform, for the competitiveness of the country,” a confident-looking Tigipko said at a polling station in Kiev. The National Exit Poll Consortium gave him 13.5 percent.

Many Ukrainian voters appeared to have low expectations of Sunday’s vote, with some wondering whether the election can help the country recover.

“I think things will get even worse,” said Tamara Alexandrova, a retired resident of Kiev. “I live near the presidential offices, and you see what happens there. Nobody cares about the people.”

As part of an international effort to bolster confidence in the election returns, foreign observers have fanned out across the country to monitor voting in the country.

(AP, Reuters, MT)