KIEV, Dec 2: Russian President Vladimir Putin threw his weight on Thursday behind Ukraine's outgoing president in his bid to block a quick rerun of disputed presidential polls that the country's opposition thinks would bring it victory.
At a meeting with President Leonid Kuchma at an airport outside Moscow, Putin said the idea of restaging just the second round of the elections, as demanded by opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko, could well fail.
He said he shared the views of Kuchma, who has said that if the election was to be held again, it should be done from scratch - a process that could take up to three months. That would keep Kuchma in office and enable him to establish greater control over the election process and choose a candidate to his liking.
Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovich was declared the winner of a Nov. 21 second round run-off election branded fraudulent by Yushchenko and much of the Western world. Just after Putin spoke, US President George W. Bush said any new election in Ukraine should be "open and fair" and free of foreign influence. "The will of the people must be known and heard," he told reporters in Washington.
Putin, who twice visited Ukraine during the election campaign to back Yanukovich, told Kuchma in televized remarks: "A repeat of the runoff vote may fail to work. The re-run can be held twice, three times, 25 times until one of the parties gets the desired result."
He also said he was "very worried" about a possible split-up of Ukraine following the elections. "We support your actions aimed at maintaining the integrity of the state," he added.
The Moscow talks came as Ukraine's Supreme Court looked set to rule on Friday on the election dispute. After 10 days of mass protests, Yushchenko supporters trudged again through slush-filled Kiev streets, responding to his call to exploit the momentum to overturn an election he said was stolen by Yanukovich through mass fraud.
Ukraine's politicians have agreed to wait for the court's decision before changing laws to allow a new election.
NEW STRUGGLE: If the court rules that the election was not legitimate, the Central Election Commission, which had proclaimed Yanukovich the winner, will probably call a new poll - but that issue has sparked a new struggle between the two sides.
Yushchenko runs the risk that the mass demonstrations in his support will lose steam and he will run out of funds if the entire process has to start over. Jan Kubis, secretary general of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) and part of a foreign mediation team in Kiev, was optimistic progress was being made towards resolving the crisis.
"I am very glad that there is a political will on both sides to find a way out of this political crisis," he said in a BBC interview. But hundreds of demonstrators blocked government buildings despite what Kuchma said had been an agreement to allow access.
"We are waiting for the Supreme Court decision and we believe that it will be in our favour," said Dima, a student from eastern Ukraine, who was manning a blockade near the presidential administration building.
"If not today, then tomorrow. I really believe that we'll win. People are becoming sick, tired. But it's impossible to break us," he said as a medic passed through the crowd, spraying throat disinfectant into the mouths of the picketers.
"This is a conflict between an immoral and overbearing political system and a prospect of democracy and moralization," Cardinal Lubomyr Husar, head of Ukraine's 5-million-strong minority eastern-rite Catholic church, told Italy's daily Corriere della Sera. On Wednesday, the opposition scored a victory when parliament voted to sack Yanukovich as prime minister. But he called the vote illegal and refused to accept it. -Reuters
