Ukrainian Leaders Warn of Looming Split

Posted on Sat, Dec. 04, 2004
YURAS KARMANAU
Associated Press
http://www.belleville.com/mld/belleville/news/breaking_news/10341340.htm

KHARKIV, Ukraine - The governor of Ukraine's Kharkiv region called on both candidates to bow out of the Dec. 26 presidential revote. Other leaders in Russian-speaking eastern and southern Ukraine condemned the Supreme Court decision calling for the new runoff and warned the former Soviet republic was heading toward a split.

Police in the gritty, industrial city of Kharkiv, about 280 miles east of Kiev, kept several thousand supporters of Kremlin-backed Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych - waving blue-and-white flags - separated from a larger crowd of Viktor Yushchenko supporters shouting, "We won't be divided!" Yanukovych has garnered his strongest support in eastern Ukraine, where the mainly Russian-speaking population has close historical ties to Moscow and fears being marginalized by Yushchenko and the Ukrainian-speaking center and west.

"The eastern and southern regions have laid a plentiful table for the whole Ukraine, but we are being proposed to be waiters (at that table)," said Yanukovych supporter, Leonid Gelenko, 34.
The southern Donetsk region has set a January referendum seeking a measure of autonomy, raising fears of the country's breakup.

But Boris Deich, speaker of parliament of the autonomous region of Crimea, said, "Ukraine must remain united and undivided." The Supreme Court's decision Friday invalidated results of the Nov. 21 vote, which the opposition claimed was rigged in favor of Yanukovych and Western
governments refused to recognize. The court mandated a new runoff Dec. 26. At the grand opera house in Kharkiv, more than 1,000 delegates - many wearing scarves that read "Yanukovych is president of Ukraine" - gathered at a conference of leaders from eastern and southern Ukrainian regions. The delegates called the court's decision politically motivated and urged both candidates to pull out of Dec. 26 revote.

Kharkiv regional Governor Yevgeny Kushnarev called for the passage of constitutional reforms before electing a new president. He wants both candidates to bow out of the new vote. "I call on both Yanukovych and Yushchenko to agree to a zero option and give way not to each but to the Ukrainian people," Kushnarev said.