Pro-Russian leads in race in Ukraine

February 8, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

KIEV, Ukraine (AP) — Exit polls showed pro-Russian opposition leader Viktor Yanukovych with a narrow lead Sunday in Ukraine’s presidential runoff — a result that could restore much of Moscow’s influence in a country that has labored to build bridges to the West.

The National Election Poll survey predicted that Yanukovych would capture 48.7 percent of the vote to 45.5 percent for Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, with other voters mostly choosing “Against all.” The 3.2 percentage point gap is slightly larger than the NEP’s margin of error of plus or minus 2.5 percent.

All the other major exit polls also showed Yanukovych winning, some by a slightly larger margin.

Nevertheless, Sunday’s runoff vote appeared to be much closer than the first round Jan. 17, when Yanukovych had a 10 percentage-point lead over Tymoshenko.

Despite the polls, Tymoshenko, the darling of Ukraine’s 2004 pro-Western Orange Revolution, declared that she was still in the race.

“It is too soon to draw any conclusions,” Tymoshenko said. “A split of 3 percent is within the margin of error.”

She urged her supporters to fight for every ballot and said her team would be closely monitoring the counting process. Tymoshenko has repeatedly claimed that her opponent planned to falsify the vote — something that certainly happened in the 2004 presidential election.

But Matyas Eorsi, from the Council of Europe’s observation mission, called Sunday’s election “calm” and “professional” and said there was no evidence it had been stolen.

“We are 100 percent sure that this election was legitimate,” Eorsi said. “All the international community, and even more important, the Ukrainian public can accept this result.” Tymoshenko’s impassioned leadership of the 2004 Orange protests against a rigged presidential ballot allegedly won by Yanukovych made her an international celebrity. That ballot was thrown out by the courts for fraud, and Yanukovych was trounced by Orange forces in a revote as foes cast him as a Kremlin lackey.