KIEV, April 2. /TASS/. The leader of the Batkivshchyna (Fatherland) party Yulia Timoshenko has accused incumbent Ukrainian President Pyotr Poroshenko of vote rigging in the first round of the March 31 presidential election, but said she is not planning to challenge the results.
"I can definitely say that Ukrainian President Pyotr Poroshenko has rigged the election, especially his own results. They were not just rigged, they were distorted," Timoshenko told a news conference on Tuesday.
The former Ukrainian prime minister insisted that Poroshenko had utilized dirty election technologies. "One of them was to register 39 presidential candidates in order to split votes and enable the incumbent president to get a chance to reach the runoff," she said. "And we saw this: unfortunately, in the first round they managed to divide the votes of pro-Ukrainian opposition forces."
Timoshenko also accused Poroshenko of vote buying, which was also sponsored from the budget funds. In particular, the authorities earmarked money from the state coffers in additional payment for millions of pensioners. They also paid some people who agreed to vote for the president, she claimed.
All this distorted the results even before the election began, according to Timoshenko. Besides, one of candidates had the same family name with her and during the vote counting some ballots were considered in his favor. Those ballots with two marks were recognized as invalid. "And at last, on election day a 100% voter turnout was recorded at hundreds of polling stations and then there were incredibly high results in favor of the incumbent president - more than 80%," she said. Video recordings show that hundreds of ballots were taken from other candidates’ piles to those of the president.
However, Timoshenko stated that she would not contest the election outcome in court, because she does not believe in justice in Ukraine. "I can say at once that we are not going to court," she said. "There is no judicial system in Ukraine, that’s why it’s impossible to challenge the election there."
Timoshenko also emphasized that she believes it is wrong to launch street protests because this will undermine stability in the country and escalate internal divisions. "We still have another chance to change everything and fulfill a new course, that’s the parliamentary election," she said.
According to the CEC, the leader of the Batkivshchyna (Fatherland) party Yulia Timoshenko comes in third with 13.38% of the vote. Comedian and leader of the Servant of the People political party Vladimir Zelensky leads the Ukrainian presidential race with 30.26% of the vote, while Poroshenko secured 15.92%, with 97.77% of ballots counted, the Central Election Commission said.