KIEV, Nov 23: Ukraine's opposition leader declared himself president on Tuesday as tens of thousands of his supporters massed in front of parliament, deepening the political crisis in this bitterly divided nation after elections widely condemned by the West as fraudulent.

With his hand on a Bible, Viktor Yushchenko swore to "defend the rights and liberties of Ukrainian citizens" at an emergency session of parliament called to discuss the turmoil.

"Ukraine today is on the verge of civil conflict," the pro-Western former premier warned, as the Lviv region, an opposition bastion, joined the capital Kiev and five other cities in rejecting the official results giving victory in Sunday's presidential vote to pro-Russia Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovich.

Ukrainian parliament speaker Vladimir Litvin refused to recognise the oath of office, and the parliamentary session was attended by too few deputies to make any binding resolution. "There has been no inauguration," he said. "One must not provoke people."

In a further sign of the deep divisions wracking the country, the regional government of Donetsk, a pro-Moscow fiefdom, denounced the protests gripping Kiev and the Ukrainian-speaking western districts.

The council of Donetsk, from where the premier hails, called on Yushchenko and his supporters "to accept defeat with dignity and to accept the complete and irrevocable victory of Yanukovich."

Earlier, Yushchenko called on the international community to recognize him as the real winner of an election seen by some observers as the most important in Eastern Europe since the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union.

A victory for him would pull the strategically important Eastern European nation of 48 million people out of Russia's age-old embrace and eventually put it into the fold of the European Union and maybe even NATO, shifting liberal Europe's centre of gravity closer to Russia's borders.

He called on "parliaments and people of the world" to recognize him as the real winner of the vote. "In the 20th century, we are facing a threat to the will of a people of one of Europe's largest countries," he said in a statement.

The dispute has split this former Soviet republic down the middle, with the Ukrainian-speaking west mainly behind Yushchenko and the Russian-speaking east backing Yanukovich.

Dutch Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende, whose nation holds the rotating EU presidency, told Ukraine's outgoing President Leonid Kuchma that the EU had "doubts" about the result of the vote. Mr Kuchma's office retorted that "the authorities of Ukraine cannot intervene in the electoral process, and cannot influence the election results." -AFP